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Image by Semevent from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The trend is spreading. Coal, the stranded asset of a bygone era, is hot property again everywhere. All it took was a few weeks of an energy crisis, and decades of brainwashing against coal is evaporating.
On Friday, I wrote about how countries like Japan, Korea, and India were redirecting themselves towards coal power. Now Bloomberg, Fortune, and others are reporting this trend. As I write, Italy is considering delaying the closure of all its coal plants til 2038, Germany is reopening old coal plants. Thailand is restarting two coal plants it only shut down last year. Bangladesh is going to run its coal plants at max capacity all summer.
And the Ecoworriers are starting to fear this crisis will trigger a more permanent shift back to coal — which it absolutely will — not because of ‘sunk costs’ or any of the other excuses the greenies tell themselves, but because the oil crisis will break the sacred exorcism spell cast upon coal. Governments have been shocked at how vulnerable they are without fossil fuel energy.
People might be ordering EVs, but governments want fossil fuels.
Activists should be panicking […]
Phillippsburg Nuclear Power Plant by Lothar Neumann, Gernsbach [1]
By Jo Nova
How fast was this backflip? How big was this mistake…
Germany shut down its last three reactors in April 2023, but three years later, they’ve realized it was a terrible mistake and want to rebuild them or put small modular reactors “likely on the same sites”.
After 66 years of operating nuclear power without any major accidents, the irony was that Germany shut down its nuclear industry mostly because other countries had accidents. But now they admit they need more electricity.
This would be one of the biggest backdowns in the fake renewables “transition”. Germany is the third largest economy in the world, and Chancellor Merz said this openly at a business conference a few days ago, but the mass media have said nothing.
The media groups that have reported it are niche outlets with names like Deseret News, TVPWorld, and American Thinker.
Translations from the video below:
Chancellor Merz “It was a serious strategic mistake to exit nuclear energy. We are now undertaking the most expensive energy transition in the entire world. I know of no other country that makes things so difficult for its […]
By Jo Nova
Don’t call these fossil fuel generators — they are baby hydrogen plants!
Facing industrial death, Germany has finally decided it needs dispatchable reliable electricity. But they can’t announce that they suddenly need to build 10 gigawatts of fossil fueled gas power plants. It would be like admitting the sacred Energiewende had been a ghastly mistake that wasted billions of dollars on a reckless vanity quest to change the clouds. So instead, these new “power plants” with a focus on “gas-fired sites” must be convertible to run on hydrogen by 2045. Of course, they may never run on hydrogen, given that makes pipes brittle, leaks, and costs four times as much as natural gas, but it makes a good cover story.
This is exactly what I would do if I wanted to hide a major backflip and pretend this was just a slight variation on the renewables theme. (Especially if I had no scruples).
Note that the Reuters Blob-Media story (below) does not mention the words “fossil fuels” or “dispatchable” it just talks about the need to generate electricity over “a longer period of time”.
The gas to hydrogen plant story is the PR cover and escape […]
By Jo Nova
Green activists who sabotaged the Berlin grid last week may not have convinced anyone that carbon dioxide was a threat, but they have raised awareness that Germany needs more diesel generators, and thermal power plants.
On January 3rd, left wing extremists caused the longest blackout in Berlin since World War II leaving 100,000 people without heating or electricity for up to five days in midwinter. Suddenly local utilities have realized how vulnerable Germany is and are calling for a “national crisis reserve of mobile generators and heating systems.” And they want several hundred megawatts of it.
The association of local utilities (VKU) put out a press release calling for this new emergency reserve to be set up and spread around the country so it can restore power within 24 hours. They also for someone to clear away the bureaucratic red tape that slowed down the helpers, specifically mentioning the odd thing that must have delayed the response this time — like “responsibility, permits, liability, costs, labor rules and insurance.”
They paid homage to the “decentralized energy supply base on renewables” which could have (but didn’t) mitigate the damage. They probably had to write that. […]
By Jo Nova
The world really is waking up to the terrible truth about the forced “green transition”. The Wall Street Journal (finally) speaks the blasphemy out loud — countries with a lot of renewables are “hemorrhaging industry”, they face right-wing revolts in elections, they can’t keep up in the AI race, and the system wide costs of renewable electricity are crippling.
The pagan quest to do rain-dances with electrical generators has become an existential threat. If AI is the next revolution, then the lands of green fantasia have already lost the race. There’s a global contest to create the first world dominating AI before anyone else does. This is not an exponential curve we can afford to lose. The first nation to crack adversaries encryption codes, hack their defenses, design the killer bioweapon, or build a self replicating drone army — potentially takes it all.
The contest is, above all, an energy competition. Ponder that gram for gram, each day the human brain uses ten times the energy than muscle does, yet despite that stupendous cost, it conquered the world.
For twenty years some rich countries became mired in corruption and virtuous beauty contests. They toyed with […]
By Jo Nova
Savor the moment. Donald Trump says he wants no wind farms built during his Presidency, and before we can even crack the champagne , the AfD in Germany say if they are elected, they don’t just want to stop people building new wind plants, they want to tear some of the old ones down.
That’s what we like to see, some competition… Who can get to Not Zero the fastest?
Trump Says He Wants No Wind Farms Built During Presidency
By Bloomberg
Bloomberg) — President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday he would seek to have a policy of having no wind farms constructed during his second term, threatening billions of dollars in planned wind projects.
“We are going to have a policy where no windmills are being built,” Trump said during a lengthy tirade against wind power during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Trump, who has vowed a first day executive order targeting wind farms, has long made no secret his disdain for the energy source. But his remarks Tuesday represented the sharpest threat yet from the incoming president.
German Far-Right threatens To Tear Down […]
By Jo Nova
People forget that while electricity flows down those long interconnectors, sometimes high prices flow back the other way.
The Dunkelflute (wind drought) and a cold weather spell means electricity is at nosebleed prices. In southern Norway usually people pay €0.18 per KWh but the electricity price rose to over €1.12 per kilowatt hour for the highest cost hour last week. In southern Sweden the electricity used for a 10 minute shower cost €2.65 compared to €0.01 in central Sweden.
Montel Analytics forecast German wind output to drop to 2.8 gigawatts, compared to a normal capacity of 19 gigawatts at this time of year. The shift in weather has forced Germany to burn more fossil fuels, fire up coal power stations, and import energy from France…
In Germany consumer prices hit €936 per megawatt hour at one point last week because wind energy had failed. This was the highest level in 18 years. Things were so bad, companies stopped production in Germany.
Due to record-high electricity prices in Germany, several companies, including some that have been in operation for over a century, have been forced to halt production. Currently, electricity prices have reached […]
Jo Nova
The Greens have become the “punching bag” of the Left and the Right
Things just keep getting worse for the Greens in Germany. After two terrible performances in recent state elections the Party “crashed out of the state parliament” in the Brandenburg region of Germany (which surrounds Berlin). Results were so awful, the two current leaders of the German Greens have jointly stepped down.
The Greens won a mere 4% of the vote in the region, not even reaching the minimum 5% required to win a parliamentary seat in the State election. About 70% of their voter base had abandoned them in the last five years. In Thuringia, the entire traffic light ruling coalition of three parties barely amassed 10% of the vote collectively.
The right-wing AfD (Alternative for Germany) party “keeps rising despite efforts to stop the party” says Nette Nöstlinger at Politico, slightly baffled. The establishment used the nastiest names they could think of, and it didn’t work:
The AfD keeps rising despite efforts to stop the party
Germany’s mainstream leaders have made a concerted effort to stop the rise of the AfD by warning voters of the party’s growing extremism, with some […]
Phillippsburg Nuclear Power Plant by Lothar Neumann, Gernsbach
By Jo Nova
If the Germans just did nothing at all, it would have been Greener
Germany already had nuclear power in 2002, if they just kept it and didn’t build all the wind and solar plants, they wouldn’t have had to spend 697 Billion Euro on subsidies, and would have cut their emissions by 73% more.
If ever there is a statistic that says there is something rotten in the State of Climate Panic, this is surely it. I mean, does CO2 matter or doesn’t it? Do the Greens care at all, or even a bit? If there was a climate emergency and The Greens were worried about CO2, they might have protested that the EnergieWende was a reckless experiment. But if the Greens were tools for communists, foreign states or banker-investors, then they might keep choosing options that benefit other countries, help Bankers or just make Big Government bigger.
Either the German Greens have utterly failed at the very task they set out to do, or they were really aiming at something else.
Ross Pomery writes at RealClearScience and WattsUpWithThat
Study Quantifies Germany’s Disastrous Switch Away From […]
…
By Jo Nova
About 90% of solar panels installed in Germany come from China, and earlier this year one of the last solar panel manufacturers closed in Germany. Last week, what was left of the industry begged for mercy (and subsidies) which they didn’t get. Now another German solar panel manufacturer has closed down.
For some cruel reason German factories which are close to their customers, can’t compete with distant foreign factories which have access to slave labor, fossil fueled shipping and cheap coal fired electricity?
The bigger question, seemingly, is how did the country that invented the printing press, diesel engines, and the theory-of-relativity get fooled by such a stupid ploy? Someone told them they could save the world with unreliable energy, so they converted their generators to unreliable ones, only to discover that they can’t afford to use unreliable generators to make the unreliable generators they need to keep saving the world?
The only government stupider than Germany is the one that has already seen how badly this worked out and announces they’re going to do the same thing. Australia is not only ten years too late, but China has flooded the market to the […]
This is what the terrorists have caused.#GigaBerlinBrandenburg#StandbyTesla pic.twitter.com/SzI2UcW21r
— Gigafactory Berlin News (@Gf4Tesla) March 5, 2024
By Jo Nova
The Vulkangruppe (Volcano Group) activists have claimed responsibility for sabotaging a pylon that supplied power to the Tesla Gigafactory in Germany. The factory that makes half a million EVs a year had to close Tuesday and send 12,000 workers home. About 2,000 local homes also lost power.
Electricity may not be restored until March 17th and Pierre Goslin at NoTricksZone reports the bill is now estimated to be “over half a billion euro”.
Apparently the radical-conservationists thought setting fire to a pile of tyres at the base of a high voltage tower was a way to free the forest and the workers from a capitalist tyranny.
Tesla sabotage in Germany
Shortly after, an organization known as the Volcano Group (Vulkangruppe) claimed responsibility for the fire online. “We sabotaged Tesla today,” the far-left environmental group stated in an open letter that also accused Tesla CEO Elon Musk of being a “techno-fascist.”
The letter went on to criticize Tesla’s implications in driving predatory capitalism, worker exploitation, environmental degradation and modern surveillance technology, which is why. […]
By Jo Nova
Instead of the conservatives being torn apart by climate change, now it’s the left side of politics
Politicians finally seem to realize the voters don’t want to spend money on climate change.
Once all players in politics realize that their climate policies and green pledges paint targets on their backs, it’s the beginning of the end.
The UK Labour Party has bragged for two years that it will spend £28bn on green investment if they get elected. But their Green Prosperity Plan has become a target for conservatives to shoot down, and apparently the Labour party is now publicly falling all over itself to distance itself from the number £28bn. They’ve delayed it, added qualifiers, and reduced it from a “pledge” to an “ambition” but nothing seemed to work. Finally, they have had to declare that the spending target has been dropped.
A spending target was always a stupid thing, on any issue. What organisation, company or billionaire pledges to throw money for the sake of hitting a spending target, as if spending itself was the goal? It’s a vanity gig — only for those who want to show off their wealth (or in this case, […]
By Jo Nova
For weeks a huge uprising has been building in Germany against NetZero, green tape and rampant taxes. The Germany government gave a partial concession last week, but the protests only grew stronger. Not only are the autobahns and streets grid-locked with thousands of tractors and trucks, but the freight and passenger trains have also stopped in a three day strike. Cargo boats are blocking inland waterways and canals. There is a looming strike of doctors as well, and the cluster of discontent has been labelled “Mistgabelmop ” — the pitchfork mob. Convoys are up to 20 kilometers long, and are widespread. The protests appear to be spreading. There are rumors of protests gathering in support in France. Romania, Poland, and the UK
Pierre Gosselin, at NoTricksZone in Germany, writes “Never in postwar history has a ruling government been so unpopular“.
The things the BBC/ABC/CBC/NPR/etc didn’t tell you on the news tonight can be found in five minutes on Twitter. Vive Free Speech. Thank you Elon. Those who control most of the Western media don’t want the unwashed masses to know about these protests because they fear the protests will spread like wildfire.
“They feel […]
By Jo Nova
The Pandemic woke up a lot of people
Thanks to Pierre Gosselin at NoTricksZone who lets us know that Kristina Schröder — a minister in the Angela Merkel government for four years, has written in Der Pragmaticus, of her fear that the German government is copying the dark pattern of the pandemic to create a nation where the government controls what people eat and wear, and whether they can travel.
It would have helped if she had seen this coming ten years ago, when she was a Minister, but she says, she did not believe Germans would accept drastic restrictions for the “collective good” until the pandemic hit. Now she asks why there is a blindness to the costs of climate action, and why there is indifference to the losses of freedom. (Obviously, the German media and industrial censorship complex is just like the rest of the West, and there is no outrage allowed, no node for protests to gather on, and a constant stream of gaslighting — “renewables are cheap”, the “world is hotter than ever” and “climate change makes goldfish alcoholic”, that sort of thing).
The good news is that word is spreading…
Kristina […]
By Jo Nova
Oh the irony — Green heat pumps and EV’s will need to be curtailed on a Green Grid
We’re watching the real time collapse of parts of the “Climate Industry” in on itself. The left eats its own. The EV’s and heat pumps the German government was coercing people to use are so incompatible with unreliable expensive energy, they will be among the first appliances to be restricted in the new clean green economy.
The truth is — Solar and wind power can’t power EV’s. In Germany the network regulator is working on ways to limit electricity to hungry EV’s and heat pumps so they don’t crash the grid.
The federal grid agency will throttle the charging power so EV’s will get just enough charge for a 50 kilometer trip from two hours of charging. Home owners will be offered a discount if they give control of their chargers to the government. Effectively the rich will charge their car or turn on their heater whenever they want. The poor will “save” €110 to €190 they never needed to spend with their old car or their old heater, and go withou electricity at peak times.
EV chargers, […]
Marketing fantasies from the Boom Times of Wind. Who were they kidding? | Siemens Gamesa
By Jo Nova
It’s dire. After suffering a 36% fall in June due to unexpectedly bad maintenance bills, Siemens Energy has lost another 37% on Thursday as it revealed orders and revenue would be even lower than the current subdued expectations. The share that sold for 24 euro in May is now selling for 7.
Frankfurt Borse
Things are so bad Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of Germany has even said Siemens Energy is “very important”. Apparently talks are “intensive”, which presumably means the company is on death’s door and the German government is being asked to help save it.
And so we arrive at a point where a company selling products that depend on government subsidies is now asking to be subsidized itself. And the whole green industry depended on government pumped “science” and artificially low interest rates to exist in the first place. Like a pyramid scheme skiing on a two ponzi scams, sooner or later it has to collapse.
Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge
Siemens Energy Shares Crash 37% As Renewable Bust Sparks ‘Green Panic’
Siemens Energy […]
Turtle Castle image by SAIF 4
By Jo Nova Rishi Sunak’s delay in the NetZero Quest was the crack in the Uniparty Wall
Thanks to NetZeroWatch
It threatens to ignite a climate election. It matters, because now, suddenly, one party can point out the absurdities and the costs. They can be an Opposition, and mock the sacred cows. That doesn’t mean Sunak will do that, but the fork in the road has opened, the world is watching — and his party is suddenly up four points.
The Green funds cartel is “in shock” sayth Bloomberg, at the Sunak shift — so it must be pretty serious. Green investors are using the words “dismay” and “bewilderment”, which they almost never use. Green investment relies almost entirely on crowd psychology and government subsidies, so normally bad news is padded and fluffed so it doesn’t look so bad. We wouldn’t want to lose momentum would we? Boy are they losing momentum.
Meanwhile Sweden has not only cut climate money a bit, it’s unshackled some taxes off fossil fuels as well, leaving the centre left apoplectic and threatening to move motions of […]
By Jo Nova
Germany is a lesson for the rest of the world
Few countries have placed a bigger bet on “renewables” than Germany, which installed some 28,443 wind turbines, and at its peak in 2016, employed 160,000 people just in the wind industry. But the effect on the rest of the economy is devastating.
The Energiewende Green program was estimated to have cost €520 billion plus and after 20 years of subsidies and effort, reduced fossil fuel use from 84% of primary energy “all the way” down to 78%. And those presumably were the easy wins.
The cost of expensive electricity vandalizes the rest of the economy. The Green policy gamble may change Germany forever. The former economic powerhouse of Europe is coming undone — losing iconic parts to the US and Asia.
BASF — the German historic giant founded in 1865, is the largest chemical producer in the world. In 1913 it bought the new Haber Bosch process that creates ammonia for fertilizer, and thus changed the world — making billions of lives possible. But now, BASF is shifting out of Germany — spending $10 billion on a new plant in China.
Then there is Linde, an industrial […]
By Jo Nova
Last days for the industrial giant of Germany?
Thanks to NetZeroWatch
BASF in 1887. They’re cutting jobs in Germany now, closing ammonia and plastics factories but growing in Ohio.
The Green dream is unravelling in the fourth largest economy in the world. The Vice Chancellor is bluntly saying that Germany industry may have to shut down in 18 months if the current gas flow deal from Russia through Ukraine isn’t extended and he doesn’t seem to believe it could be. Meanwhile 13,000 people protested in Bavaria against the “heating ideology” — whereby evil gas is theoretically going to be forcibly replaced with wildly expensive heat pumps powered by erratic green electrons. The people just don’t want them: last year Germans installed 600,000 gas systems and only 236,000 heat pumps. Politicians are starting to back away slowly from the plan to make all new heaters “65% renewable” by next year. It’s starting to look like the backdown on banning fossil fuel powered cars.
The German economy is possibly in a recession already and Greens are finally getting the blame. It’s so bad that journalists worry that the “Far Right Surge” could endanger some businesses. The right […]
By Jo Nova
Only two men were central to the Green policy stranglehold that cripples Germany today, and one has just been sacked. But look at how easy it was for foreign interests and activists to influence bizarrely suicidal national policies, and how they used the age old art of nepotism.
Eugyppius
A vast foreign-funded climate cabal with a death grip on policy is currently fighting hard to crash the Federal Republic of Germany with no survivors
The international press has maintained near-total silence on the escalating insanity of what is happening in Germany. Media outlets that routinely celebrate German progress towards energy transition don’t want you to know that Europe’s dominant industrial power has entered a deeply destructive political and administrative spiral from which it may never recover. The fault lies with the self-defeating and unworkable energy policies that have a death grip not merely on the Scholz government, but on the entire administrative state.
Germany leads the way in the big green experiment
At one point last winter 12% of the entire Germany GDP was being consumed in the energy crisis. Factories are leaving Germany because energy prices are unbearable, but […]
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