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Germany Had So Much Renewable Energy That It Had To Pay People To Use Electricity (qz.com)
Quartz reports Germany produced so much renewable energy on Sunday, May 8, that commercial customers were being paid to consume electricity: "Thanks to a sunny and windy day, at one point around 1pm the country's solar, wind, hydro and biomass plants were supplying about 55 GW of the 63 GW being consumed, or 87%. Power prices actually went negative for several hours, meaning commercial customers were being paid to consume electricity." Many critics have argued that renewable energy will always have only a niche role in supplying power to consumers, given its daily peaks and troughs. With that said, Germany plans to hit 100% renewable energy by 2050. Denmark, for example, has already generated more electricity than the country consumes from its wind turbines. It now exports the surplus energy to Germany, Norway and Sweden.
I'm sure the devil (misrepresentations) is in the details.
In the UK, since the power generation was split up, there have been occasions when generators have bid negative prices to supply electricity into the grid. These were companies operating fossil-fueled generators at times when demand was low (middle of the night).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Outside of pumping water to heights or using conventtional battery storage, there are NEW IDEAS emerging all the time.
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Id be concerned if they didn't have spare capacity during what looks like the lowest demand scenario short of a zombie apocalypse. The real issue is, how to they cope on a very cold, overcast, windless day when industrial and domestic demand is at it's highest? Also, don't they have a means of distributing power throughout the entire EU, geographically large single countries do this.
But that was with dirty fossil fuel. I only use electrons from clean sources. I use a sieve to filter out the fossil fuel derived electrons.
It is not always sunny and windy across the entire continent
This would be an option in the US if we had a modern electrical grid
Just ask Congress where funding for the superconducting electrical grid upgrade is at...
They run fans. Really BIG fans. To generate more power for each other!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
This is how it's supposed to work. Renewables are often less predictable. So have a realtime bidding service, and when it's "negative" use as much as you can to charge batteries, then when the number is positive again, get paid to push electricity back into the grid. This will subsidize people buying batteries, which will smooth out the distribution of less predictable power sources. It's working as designed, just without batteries in place, yet. Charge your car at cheap times, and feed the grid at expensive times (from car or home). Win for all, and great for the environment.
Learn to love Alaska
It certainly is, if you look at the graph in the article you will easily see that there wasnt a particularly high amount of renewable energy being generated - this price
jump looks far more like someones pricing algorithm glitching than any actual market movement - there is little difference in the previous and subsequent pattern,
and the price certainly did not jump there. I would make an educated guess looking at the graphs that someone had a shutdown delay on a system and that may
have glitched the market a touch, causing a reaction in the algorithmic pricing models.
Yet another case of sensational headlines trying to sell a non-story.
The headline really should read 'German spot-price for energy collapses for no obvious reason, another algorithmic realtime pricing glitch?' or similar.
But you have to bait the clicks somehow apparently, so much for journalistic standards..
This is a problem, not a good thing. Wind and solar production should have been throttled to prevent dumping more power on the grid than demanded rather than paying companies to burn off the energy.
The only way renewables work is if the power is used locally to reduce/level demand or as preferred peaking generation (with sufficient idle nat-gas backups to cover the worst peak). The only time prices should go negative is in the rare occasion that the demand dips below the base (nuclear/hydro/coal) generation. And in that case, wind and solar shouldn't be putting any power into the grid.
Knowledge Brings Fear
This is just another illustration that the people who claim that renewable energy can never supply nearly all of our energy needs are wrong. It's mostly just a matter of building out the infrastructure which takes time. Our current power system wasn't built overnight either.
I'm waiting until there's so much oil being produced that they pay me to accept a barrel or two.
it does come at a price to have that much renewable energy. We have among the highest prices in the world for electricity in Denmark. 75% of the price are taxes. Now they are talking about lowering the price by 10% by cutting some of those "green" taxes. But since the money has to come from somewhere, they are just putting that on income taxes instead.
Local businesses are happy because they don't get to pay anymore, consumers are happy because that are too stupid to have listened to the part that their income tax are going up, they just say "oh great lower price for electricity".
You don't use electrons, you use an electric field. And electrons move very (very) slowly through a wire. I don't remember numbers, bu think it's on the order of cm/min. Not only that, but all the electrons you get, you give back again (if using alternating current).
Adding a generator to the grid keeps the field propped up (measured in volts).
I mean here it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It grew fast but now it's stuck at about 6%. I can't remember what they were saying would be the percentile but I don't think it was 6%.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
How does Denmark push its electricity to its neighbours Germany, Norway or Sweden, when they are doing the same?
Because the wind doesn't always blow everywhere at once, but it is always blowing somewhere. Wind energy is more reliable when it is geographically dispersed, so one region's peaks can fill another region's troughs.
biomass plants Those plants are 'dispatch able' just like any other conventional plants.
Power prices actually went negative for several hours, meaning commercial customers were being paid to consume electricity.
That means basically only other power companies and not "random commercial customers". Considering that that happened on a sunday it is not as spectacularly as it seems.
On a sunday you have e.g. only a little bit more than 50% load of e.g. a mid week day peak load.
If prices go negative usually another power company is "buying" the power to fill up pumped storages. During weekdays however also steel or aluminium recycling plants are on standby to wait for such opportunities.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
it's always sunny in philadelphia
sigs are for fags
...but they won't.. Why because you'll never hear the phrase, "paying people to use electricity" in the U.S.
Oh whew. Thanks for explaining it.
It doesn't often go negative, but it regularly drops to low rates at peak solar times. So long as someone can buy low and sell high, there's a profit to be made. If that's enough to cover costs, including capital, there's a business opportunity.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
So, with a capacity factor of ~20% that means that the wind farms are a feel good effort to green wash the natural gas peaker plants and the 45% coal base production spewing carbon and radioactive waste into the atmosphere that actually provides the vast majority of the energy.
Two decades of aggressive government programs to install solar and wind and the carbon reductions are hardly noticeable. I suspect if the idiots screaming renewables woke up and realized that their solution isn't solving anything and supported nukes as well as renewable, we could actually solve the global climate change problem before it destroys us.
But you know. They pay other provinces and countries to take our power. And jack the customers prices to the highest in north america all in the name of GREEN RENEWABLE power.
We use less power and they cry they arent making enough so they jack our rates. We use more power and they jack our rates to make us use less. I and the rest of the province have some choice words for Green energy bullshit right now.
I don't understand it going negative. Why can't they just vent it? Why can't they shut it down or just disconnect the line? Hydro is easy to turn off but even solar and wind has ways to turn them off for maintenance. Barring that, just throwing a tarp over the solar would block out the sun. Heck, even running it to a nearby tank and boiling water would make more sense than paying someone to consume it. What exactly is gained by paying someone to take it versus venting it somehow?
If you are shown a demand curve sloping downward and you call it witchcraft, you may not be a capitalist.
The private sector paid for brand new transmission lines from West Texas, where the wind and sun is, to Dallas/Ft Worth.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
In Europe the electrical grid is connected between the countries. It's also on a day to day basis so one day it flows in one direction and another day in the other.
Only thing you can be sure of is that in Denmark the wind almost always blows, and if it doesn't then it's probably sunny.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
You don't control the sun and wind, you just deal with it when it's available. But it's rarely available simultaneously in all locations so the current flows forth and back.
Hydroelectric power is useful as a counter-balance to the variations in wind and solar.
Not sure where you got the "Classic sovietstyle central planning at work" from.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
...and for residential customers, Germany has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. Residential customers and small businesses pay a "renewable energy tax" (EEG) of 6.354 cents / kWh as of 2016. I have a large family, so this works out to be about 440€ additional tax burden per year, not counting the 19% VAT added on top of the EEG tax. So I am paying for all this "free electricity". This tax is highly regressive and hits poorer residents much harder because they cannot afford to invest in energy-saving appliances.
The article sounds as if it is a good thing that Germany has to pay people to use electricity. Actually it is exactly this problem that sets the upper limit to how much renewable energy can be used in a modern economy with current technology. The market correctly valued that the power produced by renewable sources had negative value, yet the producers of renewable energy were paid exactly the same feed-in tariff as they get on a cold windless evening. Doubling renewable energy production will not result in doubling the amount of electricity usefully used by Germany over the course of a year. It will be dumped somewhere in the system. Germany must solve the engineering problems required to efficiently store and recover vast amounts of energy as well as building more renewable energy generating systems to reach its goals.
I'm totally surprised that this is not a major topic of discourse in a country with such a large body of technical talent.
They're not doing it all at once. And besides power generation is going to be a blend of technologies and any spikes will smooth out as the system scales. And if it came to it and there was an excess or the excess was used during different parts of the day, it could be stored by various means - pumping water to the top of towers, flywheels, molten sodium, compressed air, hydrogen creation etc.
Now imagine you had an electric car parked up outside, with some big ass batteries in it, plugged in and storing that surplus energy.
As if surplus power is a problem?
It isn't, we just haven't moved forward quickly enough and away from fossil fuels.
To understand Germany's energy use, just look at this graph. 75% of it is fossil fuel based. The idea that it had so much renewable it had to pay people to use it is ridiculous and simply a function of the bureaucracy, not the reality.
Of course regular "little people" consumers still had to pay the regular full rate...
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That graph is the averaged over a long period. One of the issues with solar and wind power is that they tend to be very bursty, wind in particular. The power output from a wind turbine is proportional to the third power of the wind speed. If you have an hour of wind that's double the normal speed, then you're generating eight times as much power from the wind generators as normal for that hour. Most other power plants can't reduce capacity instantly to compensate so for short bursts there is a lot more power being generated than is being consumed. In some cases, it's cheaper to produce the waste power than to start decoupling things from the grid and spilling the power somewhere (ideally into storage, sometimes just as waste heat), so you end up paying people to consume the power, because it costs more to stop producing it.
Most consumers don't see this, because we buy power indirectly but some big industrial consumers have contracts that allow them to get direct access to the spot price and consume power when it's very cheap. The idea behind a smart grid is to allow everyone to benefit from this kind of thing. For example, having your fridge run its compressor when the cost of power drops very close to zero.
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I don't understand why they had hydro in this, hyro can be switched off quickly and you can use pumped hydro to use extra power available and store it in the "gravity kinetic energy battery" for later when you need power.
Posting AC as modded.
Or you could start with something the size of the Germany, like, say the North east ( Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont; and the Mid-Atlantic states of New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.) Same size, roughly the same population density and the same variation of climate and topology.
I consider news like this trés cool. Albeit percentages being usually low the Green Party has a solid standing in Germany and especially with my generation, and for good reasons too. However, that it came about for a majority holding conservative politician and party such as Merkel and the great coalition of CDU & SPD to make the call on moving out of nuclear fission was the missing piece in the puzzle. Sentiment towards fission was getting less enthusiastic throughout the decades and Fukushima Daiichi + Merkel was all it needed to finally do the u-turn in Germany.
I'm glad for once Germany is leading the pack without to much of an internal debate. The speed at which the u-turn was put in to practice is astonishing by German standards.
Nuclear Fission is on the way out, and I consider that a good thing. Nobody can take on resposibility for their garbage for a 200 000 year time period - that's a simple fact. Add to that the costs and multiple-century long consequences of disasters such as Chernobyl and Fukushima, and you got yourself a big fat no-go for this type of energy source.
You should see to it that your country decomissions nuclear fission aswell, wherever you live. It's too dangerous.
My 0.02 Euros.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Here is a graph of electricity prices where I live for the current day: http://www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/Data/Price-and-Demand/Price-and-Demand-Graphs/Current-Dispatch-Interval-Price-and-Demand-Graph-QLD. Note the red line (whole sale price) drops off the bottom graph in the small hours of the morning. It's negative.
At least were I live it has nothing to do with renewables (the sun ain't shining at that time after all). Oddly it is because coal plants suffer the same problem renewables - they can't control the power quickly. No one is using power at the coal plants are producing at 3 AM so there is an oversupply, and it's costs more to shut the plant down for the hour or so than it does to pay people to find ways to use it.
This happens just about every fucking day! How is this news?
I was skeptical so I checked.
Apparently the US has about 250 tons of nuclear waste. That should indeed fit in a not very large room - you could fit in barrels in a 20x20 meter room.
I do suspect that putting that much nuclear material in one room is a bad idea.. ;)
Problem is that it only happens on a few days a year when the sun is high in the sky, the days are long, and the wind is also blowing. Moreover, the reason that the price of electricity goes to zero (or below) is that no one really wants it at any price. In short, generation capacity is overbuilt. Why is it overbuilt? Because subsidies for renewable energy in Germany are poorly structured and do not go to zero when the wholesale price for electricity goes to zero. Who pays for the subsidies? Why the ratepayers of course.
Is there a lesson here for the US and other countries? You bet there is. But it isn't that renewable energy is dirt cheap. It's that one better be careful how one structures renewable energy subsidies (if any) because if one does not, one's electric bill is going to to include a surcharge to pay the Warren Buffetts, Koch brothers, T Boone Pickens et.al. for generating electricity that no want needs or wants.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Well, it can't push it's electricity to Germany when conditions are similar in the two places. It can push it to Sweden and Norway because they have a lot of hydro power, some of which can be run backwards.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Meanwhile France is running 85-94% low carbon. And has been since the 1990's. But nuclear is bad so we don't want to talk about that.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
At half the consumer cost of Germany, too... even if you pick a supplier that's using 100% renewable. I just relocated from Germany to France.
Remember, government programs never work and always cause problems.
Except where they don't.
Which is in most civilized parts of the world.
Except the US with its brainwashed masses driving themselves rapidly to third world living status all so they can have the 'freedom' of no job protections, the 'freedom' to get ripped off by corporations, and of course the 'freedom' to give up all the actual freedoms that not only soldiers but also regular workers fought and in many cases died for.
We can't do what? Have negative energy prices? It happens all the time: http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=5110
And as that points out, it's not necessarily a good thing. It means we're over supplied and costs of scaling down are more than the costs of selling off and encouraging that energy to be used. That doesn't mean it's a bad thing per se either but to say "we can't do that" is hopelessly naive.
In Germany, on April 8 2016 at 15:30, Solar and Wind generated only 2.1 % of demand at that time.
And the worst part is that you can't even grow bananas in most of the U.S.
Naturally our terraforming project will eventually resolve that problem.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
No, it doesn't. The global wind average is not a constant.
You are right, and furthermore not all wind is useful for wind power. Gusty winds or multi-directional winds are pretty much useless. "the wind is always blowing somewhere' is a statement of ignorance of all the other factors that matter. Even in Germany, when averaging all their wind across the country, they have times when almost no wind energy is generated.
On Jan 1, 2016 at 10:00 am Wind Output was at 0.49 GW, only about 1% of demand at that time. There are many other times like this during the year. (and solar was only at 0.14GW, so it didn't help much)
https://www.energy-charts.de/p...
To understand Germany's energy use, just look at this graph. 75% of it is fossil fuel based. The idea that it had so much renewable it had to pay people to use it is ridiculous and simply a function of the bureaucracy, not the reality.
You might find this interesting; On Jan 1, 2016 at 10:00 am Total German Wind Output was at 0.49 GW, only about 1% of demand at that time. There are many other times like this during the year. (and solar was only at 0.14GW, so it didn't help much)
https://www.energy-charts.de/p...
Funny...that the US got to where it is today for the most part, in many areas of finance, tech, etc....without overbearing Govt regulation and mandates.
But things have SLOWED a great deal in those areas, coincidentally enough...with the trend over the recent couple decades of increased Govt oversight, regulation and its "picking winners" actions.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Does that include the banking crisis, which was caused by a reduction of regulation and oversight, allowing them to get away with figurative murder on housing?
The consumer pays through higher taxation. Nuclear is heavily subsidised in France isn't it. In fact the sector is almost wholly owned by the government.
America has never had overbearing Govt regulation and mandates.
Scandinavian countries for example have more more government regulation and services, and have a happier populations as a result.
First US usage of power is about 4 times higher per household than Germany, possibly due to Germans mostly not having or using AC in the warmer months. This makes summer the power usage low in Germany. In the US the summer months are the usage high.
http://shrinkthatfootprint.com...
https://www.eia.gov/electricit...
The government (ie taxpayers) subsidize the tune of 20 billion Euros per year and rising (hiding the actual cost)
http://www.bloomberg.com/view/...
http://www.greentechmedia.com/...
http://www.seia.org/research-r...
German prices per kwh are higher (~.34 per kwh) vs US (~.15) mostly due to tax/tariff on energy, and regulatory procedures related to the infrastructure payments of solar and other renewables. The prices are rising so fast the government has had to begin a more restrictive path on new solar.
https://www.eia.gov/electricit...
https://www.cleanenergywire.or...
Based solely on price per kwh and predictable capacity, solar is awful. More specifically awful for germany, because of geography and weather trends.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/qu...
This unpredictability is causing massive new production plants using coal. This is a reult of shutting down nuclear and building solar which only generates an average of >10% of potential capacity. Altogether the solar plan's end result is not bringing them closer to meeting their climate pollution goals.
https://carboncounter.wordpres...
"when the wind suddenly stops blowing, and in particular during the cold season, supply becomes scarce. That's when heavy oil and coal power plants have to be fired up to close the gap, which is why Germany's energy producers in 2012 actually released more climate-damaging carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than in 2011. If there is still an electricity shortfall, energy-hungry plants like the ArcelorMittal steel mill in Hamburg are sometimes asked to shut down production to protect the grid. Of course, ordinary electricity customers are then expected to pay for the compensation these businesses are entitled to for lost profits."
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
We do NOW.....and it is even more power hungry than ever....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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Instead, US electric companies will send us a bill for lost revenue.
The thing is, why should anyone build a superconductor grid, when the regular grid works just fine? The real problem here is not enough transfer capacity between the various regional grids.
Scandinavian countries for example have more more government regulation and services, and have a happier populations as a result.
For the present. We'll see if it lasts.
Not sure where you got the "Classic sovietstyle central planning at work" from.
It's classic central planning. Top down decision-making based on dubious ideological goals with little to no regard for the consequences.
The consumer pays through higher taxation. Nuclear is heavily subsidised in France isn't it. In fact the sector is almost wholly owned by the government.
Nuclear is indeed subsidized in France, just like renewable energy is in Germany through artificially high costs for residential consumers (added tax). The German city where I lived for 10 years until last month has 99.99% of its energy supply (and the supply of its county) coming from dams that have been operating for decades and had been paid through a mix of city taxes and citizen investments. Yet, we were also paying the extra tax to encourage the switch to renewable energy, which was then used to put solar panels and windmills that didn't even register as a blip in the energy mix of the city. Probably because the now privatized operator wasn't using those to supply the city, but selling the energy somewhere else. In France, I'm getting my electricity through a local supplier using biomass... I'm paying less than half of German prices at peak time, but slightly more than half of German prices off peak time.
For taxation, it depends in which tax bracket you are... for a single person:
German tax rates:
French tax rates:
Germany taxes are lower if you earn between 26 791 and 52 153 a year, it is unfortunate for most of my ex neighborhood that they were mostly in the bracket where Germany is more expensive, below 26791 a year. Most of my new neighborhood is in the same bracket and pay less taxes. In my tax bracket, there is a less than 1% difference in the effective tax rate (in favor of Germany) but that is still below what I save through utilities, services, price of real estate and interest rates on the house credit. It's also a theoretical saving as I am paying my income tax in Luxembourg where my effective tax rate is a whole 11% lower than what it would theoretically be in Germany (theoretically, because my gross salary would also be lower in Germany).
Another big difference in taxation between the two country is property taxes, I'm paying roughly the same amount of property taxes in France as I was paying in Germany. My property in France is way bigger than the one I had in Germany. In France, the property tax includes things like garbage disposal, water treatment and TV tax. Garbage disposal and water treatment have been privatized in Germany, so you have to pay extra money on top of the property tax. As I lived in the suburbs of the city in Germany, I wasn't actually getting any of the services I was supposed to receive through my property taxes (library, maintained roads, ...).
I was paying a pet tax in Germany, which doesn't exist in France, and gets very expensive if you have more than 1 dog. I'm getting far better network connectivity options in France even tho I moved to the middle of the sticks and I lived in the suburbs of a decent sized city in Germany. Road tax in Germany is to be paid every year, it is a once-off in France when you register the vehicle. As a trade-off, in France, I would have to pay to use toll roads (highways I use maybe once or twice a year). The car road-worthiness check in France is half the price of the same check in Germany.
All in all, France is a cheaper option for me.
No, you really don't.
Buildings kill orders of magnitude more birds than wind turbines, and are in turn dwarfed by the number killed by domestic cats. If that's your argument you should be calling for buildings, cell/radio towers, and cats to be removed before you even mention wind turbines.
And whether you need to use something has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on whether it is renewable or sustainable. You know what those words mean, right? They are to do with energy production not consumption.
Your entire argument boils down to "nuclear energy could be as clean as solar currently is, but it isn't". That's not great. Sporadic capitalised words don't make up for shoddy reasoning, regardless of how angry at greens you were when you wrote that.
Classic Soviet-style central planning decided exactly what factories should produce. Changing the economic environment to be better for the desirable stuff works much better, and is exactly what the Five-Year Plans didn't do. Since, with all costs internalized, the desirable stuff wins anyway, this is mostly a matter of accounting for the full price of things. Coal power imposes sizable costs on the community in general that solar and wind do not, and solar and wind subsidies more or less compensate for that.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Since, with all costs internalized, the desirable stuff wins anyway, this is mostly a matter of accounting for the full price of things. Coal power imposes sizable costs on the community in general that solar and wind do not, and solar and wind subsidies more or less compensate for that.
Well ok, Soviet-style planning wouldn't have much reliance on market manipulation because there wouldn't be much markets to manipulate. But they would have the same flimsy rationalization. You speak of the sizable negative externalities (which I can't help but note have not been quantified in any way, much less by a market approach) and not the sizeable positive externalities. There are huge positive externalities to cheap energy.
And it's worth noting here that the costs of the scheme are dumped on the small customers with apparently certain large customers still allowed to tap into electricity without the subsidy mechanism driving up their costs. That makes the scheme also a subsidy of large consumers of electricity by small ones.
Are you talking about their being no demand for Electricity. if so when you are spewing radioactive waste into the environment (coal power stations) you should stop producing as well.
Or are you talking about their being no demand for solar panels and wind turbines? I think as shown across the world their is demand.
I would also like sources for your birds being killed by wind turbines(wind mills are the ones on farms). I can almost guarantee that all the references will be able to be traced back to one California wind farm.
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The consumer pays through higher taxation. Nuclear is heavily subsidised in France isn't it. In fact the sector is almost wholly owned by the government.
Nuclear is indeed subsidized in France, just like renewable energy is in Germany
You mean "just like nuclear energy was in Germany, with costs of at least 20 billion Euros still coming just for shutting down the plants, and unknown costs for long term storage of the waste.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
Are you sure about that?
These times are actually signs of a major issue, if the overcapacity of power generation from renewables hits those levels, it means that the variability of the power generation is causing issues.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The actual reason for the subsidies is that they avoid the building of new polluting power plants that nobody wants, which would be subsidized by tax breaks or rate increases or both.
Except that if you look into it, the exact opposite is happening. Germany has increased the building of polluting Coal and Oil power plants to balance out the variability of the Wind and Solar power, while decommissioning "scary" nuclear plants that would be much cleaner even when melting down.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
It's very hard to quantify the costs of global warming. If you read the IPCC report, you'll notice lots of things listed with various degrees of confidence. Many of those will have costs that are extremely hard to quantify. We do know that they're going to be significantly greater than zero, and we can come up with some sort of reasonable guess of about what a reasonable carbon tax would be. Then we let the market sort it out. The market CANNOT evaluate externalities, by definition.
Cheap energy is not an externality. It's a desirable thing to have in the market, which is something completely different. Raise the price of energy, and the market will adapt efficiently (well, much more efficiently than any other way I know). This will have some unpleasant effects, which we can alleviate in the worse cases with the money collected from the carbon tax. Obviously there's a tradeoff between using lots of fossil fuels to make things better now and worse over time and using little, and with a halfway intelligent value of the carbon tax the market can decide that.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If you read the IPCC report, you'll notice lots of things listed with various degrees of confidence.
Which if you read the IPCC reports, you'll notice that the degrees of confidence often have little to do with what the confidence should be. There is a factor of three difference from lowest to highest bound on the estimate of the long term temperature forcing of a doubling of CO2, with a corresponding physical difference of centuries in when temperature rise effects occur.
Then you have claims of severe harm coming from modest rises of temperature which could merely be alleviated by moving towards the poles and uphill a short distance to maintain the current temperature range and the current height above sea level. Moving more than seven billion people (which let us note, we don't actually need to do) is not a trivial cost, but they will be moving a bunch anyway. I think that exposes the fundamental dishonesty of the IPCC rhetoric. There is no hint that their claimed temperature rise say at 2100, might actually happen in say 2050 or 2200.
We do know that they're going to be significantly greater than zero, and we can come up with some sort of reasonable guess of about what a reasonable carbon tax would be.
Even so, those effects are grossly exaggerated and then exaggerated again via low time value modifiers. Meanwhile the cost of mitigation strategies are routinely downplayed. Where is there a discussion of the considerable costs and minimal impact of contemporary climate change mitigation?
Cheap energy is not an externality.
Patently false. It is a considerable positive subsidy because it not only provides a direct value to parties purchasing the cheap energy, but also considerable indirect benefit via a better-functioning society and a more active economy.
That's why energy has routinely been subsidized in the first place. Almost every economic policy maker goes off of GDP as a thing to improve and cheap energy boosts GDP.
You mean "just like nuclear energy was in Germany, with costs of at least 20 billion Euros still coming just for shutting down the plants, and unknown costs for long term storage of the waste.
No, I meant exactly what I wrote... how is an added 22.2% "Renewable energy surcharge" on all electricity used by residential consumers, used to ensure a minimal price for the renewable energy producers, not a subsidy? The total of the eco-related surcharges and taxes is roughly one third of the final price.
The consumer price of electricity in Germany is split as follows:
How is an extra "nuclear has been subsidized for decades, and despite being damn profitable for the energy companies, the German citizen will have to pay a few hundred Euros each to shut the whole thing down, and we still haven't spoken about storage of the waste yet" tax fair?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.