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ENERGY IS THE KEY: RENEWABLE ENERGY PROBLEMS IN GERMANY

RENEWABLE ENERGIES ARE NOT A SOLUTION RATHER THEY INCREASE FOREIGN DEPENDENCY. Michael Limburg

ABSTRACT The basic requirements for a steady, demand-oriented, economic and environmentally compatible energy supply are defined and the electrical energy produced by wind, sun and bio-fuel are then rated accordingly. Although renewable energies have made considerable progress in some respects, they have major shortcomings when compared to conventional energy sources when all factors are considered. One of the main reasons is the extremely low energy density characteristic that renewable energy sources have. Another reason is the unsolved problem of the highly uneconomical large-scale storage of electrical energy, and with still no solution in sight. Bio-fuels can be stored and are thus an exception. But they have enormous problems in other areas. The deficiencies for all types of renewable energies are discussed in detail and illustrated with example calculations.

INTRODUCTION When passion substitutes reason. This old Roman saying aptly describes todays political promotion of so-called renewable energies. Renewable energies, we are told, reduce our dependency on foreign fossil fuels and do not emit climate-harmful CO2 into the atmosphere when used to produce electrical energy. Yet word has gotten out that the overall CO2 budget when one includes the manufacture and operation of wind and solar farms is horrendous at best. And when it comes to bio fuels, not even supporters deny it. Yet proponents now differentiate between good CO2 from biofuels and bad CO2 from fossil fuels. The fact that nature does not care simply gets a blind eye. Renewable energies are also not the solution for providing inexpensive and plentiful energy when based solely on technical and economic reasons, and in fact only exacerbate the problem considerably. No matter, solar advocates Franz Alt and Eurosolar pope Hermann Scheer like to tell us that the sun and wind do not send electric bills, thus giving the impression they are free for the taking. Of course they know full well this is not true. Wild berries or mushrooms are also provided for free by nature, but their price comes from the labour of picking them by hand one by one. Suddenly they become very costly. The same is true for sun and wind when used as a

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source of electrical and thermal energy because they require considerable tooling and investment. The investment and resources needed to extract even minimal amounts of electricity from the wind are exceedingly high. Even so, free energy from the sun and wind always sounds like a great idea, and masses of people have been duped into believing the energy swindlers behind them. This report looks at how expensive and space-demanding wind and sun energy truly are, and do so by examining the three main requirements for a well-functioning energy supply: economy, availability and continuous supply. The management of energy combines availability and continuity to define supply reliability, and, for good reasons, environmental compatibility also gets factored in. But for the sake of our evaluation, we will keep them separated. The above mentioned requirements serve as the basis for justifying every investment decision in building power plants, refineries, gas pipelines, etc. The result shows that neither electricity from the wind nor electricity from solar cells is able to fulfil the three requirements of economy, availability and continuous supply. In any test result, these types of energy would receive only a rating of poor in each of the three requirements. And for a composite of the three requirements, only a rating of unsatisfactory would be given. Why? ELECTRICAL ENERGY FROM THE WIND Lets first take a look at economy. According to German wind energy lobbyist Ralf Bischof, Managing Director of the National Association for Wind Energy, to the pressetext: In Germany, a stable renewable energy feed-in tariff 1 accompanied by a clear legal framework and attractive overall conditions for support and feed-in into power grids have facilitated the rapid development of electrical capacities from renewable energy sources. The amendment to the German Renewable Energy Law (EEG) provides even higher feed-in tariffs and further promotes innovation and investment. For the wind energy sector, the EEG amendment is truly welcome. It represents a change in direction and provides incentives for wind park modernisation and will reinvigorate the sector. This is great news for those who benefit from the wind business, but unfortunately not for the consumer. Why not? Today a wind turbine can be set up for approx. 1000 ($1350) for each kW of installed power rating. This installed rating, however, is rarely ever reached. In fact it is reached only when the wind blows at a speed of approx. 12 m/s (28 mph, or 6 on the Beaufort scale). This is already a strong wind that is just shy of storm force in intensity. The problems begin when the wind blows (if at all) at lower speeds. At lower speeds a wind turbine generates much less power than its rated capacity because electrical power output drops off exponentially to the third power. That means if the wind blows only at half the speed, the turbine power output is not simply reduced to a half, but rather it is cut to a mere eighth! Vice versa, doubling the wind speed increases power output eight-fold. Sound great? Unfortunately it doesnt
+ 24 June 2008 + Germany: Legal framework for profitability is favourable: That the bubble burst of the dotcom economy would repeat in the wind energy sector is not possible. The conditions are completely different, claims Ralf Bischof, Managing Director of the German Association of Wind Energy.
1

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quite work out that way as most wind turbines automatically shut down shortly after surpassing their rated power due to safety reasons. This protects the wind turbine from sure destruction when wind speeds do surpass rated capacity. And when the turbines shut down because of high wind speeds, the power they feed into the grid drops abruptly from a maximum to zero in a matter of seconds. This leads to a rapid power grid destabilisation and other back-up power generation systems have to kick in at a moments notice to prevent power grid collapse. This creates huge problems, and they will only get worse for power companies. Increasing wind energy sets the stage for potential future power outages and blackouts. Would anyone in the middle of open heart surgery want to be connected to a heart-lung machine powered by an unstable power grid that is increasingly fed by unpredictable wind energy? Normal and far more frequent in Germany are wind speeds of 4 to 7 m/s. At 6 m/s, the output of a wind turbine, as mentioned earlier, is reduced to a mere eighth of its rated capacity. And if wind speed slows even further to say only 4 m/s, then the power output diminishes to a measly 3.7% of the turbines rated capacity. This is the reason in addition to the generally inconsistent availability of windwhy wind turbines have an average capacity utilisation significantly below 20% in Germany. The figure was only 17%2 in 2006, and just a bit more in 2007. Imagine how investors would react if told the power plant they wish to invest in will run at its rated capacity less than 20% of its available time, and then remain idle. Compare this to atomic and coal-fired power plants where the figure is about 90%. Now it becomes clear why the seemingly moderate investment sum of 1000 /kW mentioned earlier becomes in reality an extremely high investment amount of well over 5000 /kW. Wind turbines hardly ever run at their maximum speed and rarely do they produce at their so-called rated capacity. It gets even worse. There still remains the problem of the extremely vast space needed by wind parks. It is simply not possible to erect wind turbines directly next to each other. They have to be located a minimum distance apart from each other in order to optimally extract energy from the windwhen it actually does blow. According to physicist Alvo von Alvensleben3: Air flow behind the rotor is turbulent, and every wind generator produces a wake behind it. This has to be taken into account when laying out a wind park. As a rule of thumb the distance between each wind turbine in the direction of the wind should be between 5 to 9 rotor diameters, and 3 to 5 diameters in the lateral direction. Due to space limitations, this is not always possible. For example this is why the operator of 2 wind turbines at the Holzschlgermatte am Schauinsland in Germany has a 15% loss in power output from his second downstream wind turbinedue to the wake from the first turbine.

2 3

According to the German Federal Association of Energy.

small in a comparison to other specific investment costs: brown coal power plants: 1200 /kW, stone coal power plants: 1000 /kW, gas-fired power plant: 600 /kW, photovoltaic system: 4000 /kW) http://www.dimagb.de/info/umwelt/alve2.html

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The green Hamburger Bildungsserver4 writes: A 650-MW coal-fired power plant is concentrated on an area of only one to two square kilometres. To get the same output from wind turbines, 325 2-megawatt wind turbines or 6500 100-kilowatt (emphasis by the author) wind turbines would be needed (calculated using rated output). If the 2-megawatt rated turbines were positioned 300 metres apart, a strip of land more than 100 km long would be needed. This calculation has been heavily sweetened to favour wind energy. In reality, because of the wind turbines measly 17% capacity utilisation, 1720 2-megwatt turbines would be required on strip of land more than 600 km long. Indeed extremely vast areas are needed to produce power from the wind. And because a 2.5-MW wind turbine has a rotor diameter of 100 metres, a distance of 300 m (3 rotor diameters) is certainly overly optimistic and simply sugar coated. In reality a distance of at least 500 m is necessary in the wind direction, and 900 m would be optimal with 300 to 500 m in the lateral direction. If one wishes to substitute a single 650 MW coal-fired power plant with a capacity utilisation of 90% using the more optimum 5 rotor-diameter distance between wind turbines, a row of 1376 wind turbines over distance of 688 km would be needed, more than the distance between Berlin and Aachen! And to avoid wakeinterference completely, the distance should be increased to 700 m, thus increasing the line of wind turbines to 963 kmabout the distance between Berlin and Paris. It also really does not help that industrious wind park operators and farmers could grow biofuel crops on a large parts of the countryside under wind turbines to boot. The large tracts of land are simply not available. Because wind turbines simply cannot be located directly next to each other, the needed area is huge (perhaps only earth-embedded, bio-friendly zero-energy dwellings that do not obstruct the wind stream could be allowed nearby). With only 300 m of distance in the transverse direction and 500 m in the wind direction, an area of 206-km2 would be needed. For the optimum distance of 500 m, a vast area of 481 km2 would be needed just to replace a single coal-fired power plantabout 100 to 240 times the area of a single midsize coal-fired power plant. Thats a huge use of land surface that could only be topped by the much-vaunted organic farming. Just how stupid do the wind turbine proponents in politics and business think we are? Yet this is only half the truth, as we know that such a huge wind energy system simply cannot replace a coal-fired power plant. As soon as the wind stops to blow, the power goes out. Doubling or even multiplying the number of wind turbines tenfold would not produce a single extra watt on a windless day. On the other hand a coal-fired power plant delivers a steady supply of power no matter what the weather does. The market does not need electrical power with a certain level of probability; rather it needs power with a certain level of certainty. Photo 25: A 750 MW coal-fired power plant in Wilhelmshaven, Germany. To produce an equal amount of energy with wind in one year, 3000 1.5-megawatt wind turbines would have to be set up next to each other5. No sane business-person would invest money in wind parks under such conditions alone. This is only possible with massive pressure, which politicians dub economic
4 5

http://www.hamburger-bildungsserver.de/welcome.phtml?unten=/klima/energie/erw-20.html Source: Prof. Dr. Appel in an e-mail to the author, 12 July 2008.

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incentives, and with politics. In 1991 the government of Helmut Kohl enacted the so-called Power Feed-in Act, which was later amended by the Socialist-Green coalition government of Gerhard Schrder to become the EEG Act (Energy Feed-in Act). This Act, chalk-full of tricks, forced disliked power companies to buy renewable energy no matter the circumstances, and to do so at exorbitant state-regulated prices. But in a tradeoff, the power companies were allowed to pass the higher costs on to the consumers. The statethe driver behind the price spiralwas then able to capitalise by collecting more revenue from energy taxes while dubiously claiming not a single subsidy is paid out. Is it any wonder that this tricky law has since become one of Germanys biggest exports (so named with delight by Environmental Secretary Michael Mller of the SPD Socialist Party)? This is how the EEG Act was either fully or partly exported to over 46 countries worldwide. Governments assume, and rightly so, that there are enough masses of stupid people, and that they wont be going extinct anytime soon. Lets turn our attention back to the costs. The so-called energy feed-in rates paid to onshore wind turbine operators is about 8.9 -ct (12 US cents) per kWh and will increase to 9.5 -ct/kWh in 2009. For offshore turbines, feed-in rates of 13 to 15 -ct/kWh have been decided. This money is paid to the wind turbine operators by the power companies (who then levy hefty surcharges on the consumers) whenever green power is fed in, whether it is needed or not. The rule of thumb that applies when feeding volatile wind energy into the power grid is: Every kW of wind generated power must be backed up an additional kW from natural gas-fired power plants in order to act as a buffer for windless periods or storms. Every kW of wind capacity requires 1 kW of capacity from natural gas! This means double capacity must be made available to ensure at least 50% delivery (When the wind blows optimally, the gas turbines shut down. And when the wind stops the gas turbines operate at full throttle). Sensible economic management begs the question: Why not do away with all the expensive wind energy and simply run the gas-fired plants full time? This would at least save the consumers a bundle. Figure 26: The increasing share of natural gas for power generation correlates extremely closely with the increasing share generated by the wind. Both trend-lines have almost identical slopes. When one observes the shorter period of 2000 to 2007, it becomes clear that both trend lines are increasing further. This increases dependency on natural gas deliveries from foreign suppliers. (Source: Winfried Heck HYPERLINK http://nature2000.tripod.com/naturstrom/wkr100.htm http://nature2000.tripod.com/ naturstrom/wkr100.htm) Recently journalists have written about the folly of such an energy policy. For example Edgar Grtner writes in his report Windmills and Co.: The Wind-Gas Cartel for ef 6: 80-year old Texas oil and gas billionaire T. Boone Pickens wishes to erect a monument for himself by leaving behind thousands of wind turbines to his fellow citizens. Already he has ordered the first 667 1.5 MW wind turbines with a total capacity of 1000 megawatts for $2 billion from green US conglomerate General
6

Edgar Grtner: Windrder und Co. Das Wind-Gas-Kartell (Windmills & Co: The Wind-Gas Cartel): http://ef-magazin.de/2008/07/14/414-windraeder-und-co-das-wind-gas-kartell

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Electric (GE). Suddenly Pickens, who seems to have converted from Saul to Paul, wishes to reduce his countrys thirst for foreign oil imports. What a man going senile, could easily dismiss as philanthropic madness, is in reality a well-thought-out business strategy. While earlier wind power investors were convinced they could help save the world through their good deeds, todays situation is completely different. Word has gotten out that every kilowatt of installed wind energy capacity has to be backed up by a kilowatt from a gas-fired turbine to buffer wildly fluctuating wind power. People who vigorously support wind energy are now, more often than not, in the business of selling natural gas or gas turbines. Indeed one discovers that the extraordinarily successful XTO Energy gas exploration company belongs to Pickens company group. Also, it is also not surprising that GEs Ecomagination campaign has a lot to do with natural gas. GE offers its wind turbines at an especially low price in order to boost its gas turbine sales. GE is the undisputed leader in the gas turbine market, where it earns far more money than it does in the highly competitive wind turbine market. Even Rex Tillerson, CEO of giant ExxonMobil can be delighted with this development. Even though Tillerson drives tree-hugging activists up the wall with his belittling of investments in renewable energies and insists that oil will remain Exxons core business, he realises theres a lot of money to be made with natural gas. Currently Exxon is investing massively in natural gas. Even the notoriously green German news magazine Spiegel Online has allowed author Wolfgang Reuter to write under the catchy headline: Kohle in den Sand gesetzt 7 (Pouring money down a hole): .... and this is how that the Gulf Region countries have developed a highly lucrative business strategy: They sell their oil at the record price of 140 US dollars per barrel on the world market, yet meet their own energy requirements by importing cheap coal, whose supply by sea is without problems. But Reuter forgot to add: And their natural gas is then sold at premium prices to ecologically correct Europe for the purpose of buffering their wind-produced energy. He also writes poignantly and with regret: This development illustrates the absurd results that a nationally limited energy policy can lead to. While Germany aims to reduce its CO2 output 20% by 2020, and wishes to achieve the double savings, many Gulf states are still considered developing countries, including the United Arab Emirates. Although these countries have ratified the Kyoto Protocol, they themselves have no obligation whatsoever to reduce CO2 emissions. Getting back to eco-holy, climate-protecting Germany and its generous subsidies for wind energy, it costs 8.9 -ct/kWh to generate electricity from the wind, whereas it costs only approx. 2.4 -ct/kWh for brown coal and atomic energy, and about 4.0 ct-/kWh8 for stone coal. The costs for additional transmission networks, hook-ups to the power grid and regulation-energy for wind
7

http://wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/dokument/54/71/dokument.html?titel=Kohle+in+den+Sand+gesetzt&id=5 7781745&top=SPIEGEL&suchbegriff=dubai+kohle&quellen=&vl=0

This price was recently 3 -ct/kWh, and has since increased to 4 ct/kWh because of the sub-optimal operation of coal-fired power plants brought on by the need to buffer renewable energy, an increase of 33 %.

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add up to another 2.4 ct-/kWh, bringing the total to 11.3 -ct/kWh. The result: The consumer is saddled with up to 4.5 times the cost encountered with conventional energy. The German state of Lower Saxony even allows itself, by law, the luxury and its citizens the burdenof having underground power transmission lines from the wind parks to the power grid instead of the supposively unattractive yet relatively inexpensive overhead power lines (why pegging the entire countryside with wind turbines is not unattractive remains to be explained by environmentalists). One no longer sees the power lines in Lower Saxony, but they cost eight times more than overhead lines! Its no wonder large energy corporations like Siemens and EON are now enthusiastically in the business and happily taking the consumer to the cleaners. A. v. Alvensleben writes: The luxury surcharge mentioned above runs at 80.30 per megawatt-hour. This leads to a total cost of (2003 hic) 1.57 billion per year, which the consumer could spare if the power from wind energy was generated by conventional methods... To make matters even worse, about 20,0009 wind turbines were installed in Germany in 2008. And the costs have gone up further. In the meantime we are at 89.17 per megawatt hour, and thus have an additional cost of 3.44 billion for consumers, all thanks to the EEG and wind power. To say it in another way: each wind turbine burdens the citizens to the tune of 176,512 per year. The madness has a method.10 Yet, this still does not include all the direct and indirect subsidies incurred. In 2002, according to a compilation by v. Alvensleben, these costs amounted to approx. 2 billion annually. Since then the figure has certainly gone up. But let us use the conservative figure of only 2.5 billion today. The devastating luxury of wind energy costs in total 6 billion annually. The wind industry employs roughly 45,000 workers, thus requiring each job to be subsidised every year with 133,000! These monster-size subsidies for the wind-energy job-creation program are outdone only by solar power, which we will examine later. Some politicians have recognised the enormity of this consumer rip-off and have finally spoken out. People who invest in wind turbines at the right place can get a payback that is not possible anywhere else, and at no risk. For this reason Kurt Biedenkopf, former Prime Minister of the German state of Saxony, once called wind turbines money printing machines, and in September 2003 then German Economics Minister Wolfgang Clement stated in an interview: It simply cannot be that some peopleand we know this because figures have been publishedget a return on an investment in wind energy plants of 16 to 20 percent. Show me any other investment where one can get such a return. It has to be possible to speak openly about these things, and Im doing just that, Im speaking openly: This simply cannot continue. Both gentlemen are correctand maybe because of their openness, are today no longer in office.
9 Numbers calculated from: HYPERLINK http://www.weltderphysik.de/de/4829.php http://www.weltderphysik.de/de/4829.php and DEWI Magazine August 2008, p., 26: 19.869 Plant with 23,044.28 MW as of 30 June 2008. 10

Further information on the costs of wind energy can be found here: http://www.windstrom-kosten.de/

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AVAILABILITY Either the wind blows, or it does not. Power generation by the wind is supplydependent, and not demand-dependent. This is the fundamental weakness of this type of renewable energy, and it cannot be solved by using technology because it does not exist yet. It neither exists today, nor will it exist tomorrow. There is no technically feasible and economic solution to this problem in sight. At the moment large scale storage of produced electrical power is not economically possible. This was known from the outset, and economical solutions to these problems have yet to be conceptualised, tried or developed. And should the problem be solved some day, the price of all types of renewable energy will continue to rise unabated. Only pump-storage hydroelectricity is able to store large quantities of energy, but it is not adequate for an unscheduled power feed-in. For an unscheduled power feed-in, the storage facility would have to be laid out on a far more enormous scale. This method has been known for years and involves vast investment. It works as follows: water is pumped to an elevated storage reservoir and later when power is needed it is allowed to flow back down through turbines, which convert the potential energy of the stored elevated water into electrical energy. However, the energy losses in this process are considerable (approx. 20%), the costs are high and the topographic requirements of a pump-storage hydro-plant can be fulfilled only in a very few locations. Germanys largest pump-storage hydro-plant is Goldisthal in the state of Thuringia, and is one of the largest in Europe. It has a capacity of a 1060 MW and can deliver its 8480 MWh of energy for a period of maximum 8 hrs. Then it is empty and must be refilled over the course of many long hours. It was built at a cost of approx. 600 million (US$ 800 million). If one wanted bridge over the power loss of four windless days, which according to Dr. Roland Hamelmann of the Lbeck University of Applied Sciences is not unusual in Germany, then 257 such pump storage hydro-plants would be needed. The required investment for such a project would amount to 144 billion. Still proponents like to point out that perhaps it is possible to get by with fewer pump storage hydro-plants, depending on how quickly the water can be re-pumped. No matter, it still remains an outrageously expensive solution. And lets not ignore the vast amounts of land that would be needed. Clearly this solution is not feasible. A variety of desperate attempts to make the wind industry capable of storing energy (e.g. using batteries, compressed air or even flywheels) have all failed due to major technical limitations. Even if a technical solution could be found, the question of cost still remains. These are the fundamental requirements that have to be fulfilled if one wishes to replace conventional sources of energy like nuclear, coal or natural gas with wind energy. The same is true with regards to solar energy. At this point one may ask, what benefit is there? Chancellor Angela Merkel as Minister of the Environment under Helmut Kohl recommended on June 17, 1997 in an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau: Energy today is too cheap . . . In my view taxes on energy, whether petroleum, heating gas or electricity, has to be increased. A decade later, she is close to reaching her target. One cannot accuse Chancellor Merkel of lacking determination. Still, one has to question her real motivation. It certainly cannot be the welfare of the German citizens.

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SUPPLY CONTINUITY Continuity in power supply is closely related to availability, yet it is a different problem.11 The grid system must be kept in balance between the available power for input to the grid, the demand for power from the grid, and the distributions of where the power is available and where it is needed. These characteristics must be maintained with an extremely high level of precision in order to prevent systems faults and so-called wattless power where power companies do not coordinate their activities, and may even work against each other. Power grids may interfere with each other and even cause others to be switched off, which has often happened in the past. This was the case in the widespread blackout of November 4, 2006 when half of Western Europe lost power because of a planned, yet wildly fluctuating wind-power feed-in that occurred in the north German Weser-Ems region.12 As an unusually high amount of wind power was fed in, an error at the EON control centre resulted in a cascade of emergency regional grid shutdowns which produced a frequency drop-off that led to an automatic shut-off and subsequent automatic switch-on of the renegade wind park. These automated steps, which fed power into the grid when it should not have, and did not feed power in when it should have, prevented the grid from returning to a stable operating condition in multiple ways. Without the troublesome, required feeding-in of wildly fluctuating and flickering wind power, the error would have been removed quickly and the problem would have gone unnoticed. But thanks to wind power this was not the case. A huge swath of Western Europe blacked out. In general, all consumers will have to suffer because they rely on a steady, uninterrupted voltage level being fed into the power grid. The improper function of synchronous clocks will be the least of their problems. ELECTRICAL ENERGY FROM THE SUN Like wind, solar energys inadequacy as a reliable power supply practically applies 1:1. It too is uneconomical, inconsistent and supply-dependent. Quantitatively, however, they are worlds apart. This is especially true with respect to cost and need for space. It cannot be overstressed: solar energy is much more expensive than the already very expensive wind energy. The efficiency of expensive solar technology
11

Prof. Alt wrote about this in a letter to the Central Committee of Catholics in Bonn (23 Nov. 08) Quote: ....The fact is that Germany and Europe is already using all useable hydro-electric power potential, this was already accomplished by our grandparents. For example already in 1905 Kaiser Wilhelm put into operation at that time what was the worlds largest hydroelectric power plant in Heimbach using 6 Francis turbines and a power capacity of 12 MW. At the time, it was enough to power the region of Aachen, Dren and Cologne with renewable electrical energy. After that, the demand for electrical power increased greatly, but the supply from the local Olef river and other nearby rivers could not keep pace. Thus the additional electricity demand had to be met with coal, gas and atomic power plants. As a result, compared to brown coal and atomic power, the also cost-effective hydroelectric power share is only about 5% today. As before, it is certainly being used to a maximum, independent of whether or not consumers switch over the green power, or of the power company.

12

Details can be found here in the UCTE Report HYPERLINK http://www.ucte.org/_library/otherreports/ Final-Report-20070130.pdf http://www.ucte.org/_library/otherreports/Final-Report-20070130.pdf

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currently stands at a miserly 8%less than half of the already lousy wind energy. At night the sun does not shine, and every single daytime cloud further reduces the energy extracted from sunlight. In addition the conversion efficiency on average is only 12% under ideal conditions. And once aging takes its toll on solar panels, conversion efficiency quickly declines further. Despite the boom in solar companies and all the political hype about the industry of the future, solar energy contributes only a puny 0.4% of Germanys total energy supply. Solar energys share is expected to increase to only about 1.5% by 2020. Yet, even this very small amount is going to cost the consumer a bundle! Today the legally-guaranteed feed-in tariff paid to solar energy producers is 57.4 -/kWh, far above the previously projected 12.5 -/kWh by solar billionaire and Future Award Prize winner Frank Asbeck of Germanys conservative CDU party. This exorbitant feed-in tariff is paid to any person who has a solar panel on the roof, and guaranteed for 20 years! Solar power replaces only the fuel-share of power generation in a power plant mix. This is a maximum of about 2 ct/kWh; for nuclear power plants its only 0.5 cent/kWh. Thus, the mandated 57.4 -ct/kWh for solar power generation as to the EEG Act is 25 to 50 times more expensive than conventional energy sources. In addition it is also highly unlikely that the black panels mounted on roofs will deliver power for 20 years. Their maintenance, removal and disposal costs are high, and will certainly incur expenses during their lifetime that far exceed their original investment. Many of these ballyhooed solar cells contain especially toxic heavy metals like cadmium. Isnt it strange how the most ardent organic food producers are often found singing the virtues of solar technology? Yet, preservatives in foodno way! Heavy metals (toxic waste) on the roof? Why not! Especially if it serves an ideology. Getting back to costs, a study conducted by RWI1315 shows that the energy feed-in tariffs for the miniscule amounts of solar electricity, other subsidies and the destruction of jobs that would have otherwise existed in other economically viable industrial sectors amount to already 7 billion today. They calculate that subsidies paid out to the solar industry amount to approx. 205,000 per year for each job. The environmentally conscious Focus weekly news magazine writes: Through the massive construction of additional solar systems and the EEGguaranteed feed-in tariffs for 20 years, the Rhine Westphalia Institute for Economic Research (RWI) calculated that up to 100 billion in accumulated cost could incur. Here the RWI experts actually used the lower power feed-in tariffs that are planned by the amendment now in discussion. Even the argument of high-tech job creation sounds cynical. Daniel Wetzel writes in the German daily Die Welt:

13

Wenn die Sonne Geld verbrennt (When the Sun Burns Money), Daniel Wetzel (http://www.welt.de/printwelt/article206001/Wenn_die_Sonne_Geld_verbrennt.html)
14

Although the German government has enacted the EEG Amendment to be effective 2009 and decreases the tariffs paid for newly installed panels to 8% annually (9% starting in 2010), it changes nothing with respect to the thrifty profits of the already established solar system operators, which are guaranteed for 20 years. Germanys solar cell promotion http://repec.rwi-essen.de/files/REP_08_040.pdf

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To make the subsidies appear politically attractive, the Federal Association for Solar Energy (BSW) hyped its own industry sector as a job engine. Bold words. According to the BSW 3500 workers are employed by the high-tech areas of cell manufacturing, silicium, chip production and frequency converters. The less technically demanding module production employs 1600. Most jobs (20,000 employees) are in the relatively low-tech building and installation trades. In fact, the number of jobs was never actually counted. The BSW simply assumed that one job exists for each 150,000 euros of industry turnover. There are people who really take pleasure in this wasteful technologylike a few German solar companies, such as one owned by Frank Asbeck. But the folks poised to cash in are Chinese and Japanese company owners. According to Frank Wetzel in the above mentioned article in Die Welt: During the past two years more than 50% of the solar electricity systems installed in Germany was supplied by foreign companies. German companies were able to bring only 201.7 megawatts onto the market in 2004. A total of at least 770 megawatts were installed in Germany according to Photon. Large foreign suppliers such as Suntech in China openly boast in the internet 80 percent of our production is exported to Europe, with Germany being the biggest market. And the prices of these solar systems exported to Germany are much higher than what they would otherwise fetch in their own domestic countries, as company Sharp recently admitted. This is the cause of much delight (and profits) for foreign manufacturers. Just call it development aid for climate protection of a whole new kind. According to Wetzel: . . . scientists have come up with other figures. Wolfgang Pfaffenberger, Director of the Bremer Energy Institute, recently investigated the impact of renewable energy on the job market. Firstly the huge cost of photovoltaics siphons off so much buying power from consumers that more jobs are lost due to the solar industry than those generated by it. The net effect is negative job creation. Just as the financial demands for solar systems are enormous, so are the needs for surface area. A single kW of real electrical output requires approx. 187 m2 (approx. 2000 ft2). And this is true only when the installation is done in the same manner as on the island of Pellworm, which has an efficiency of 8% of the output of a conventional power plant. To achieve the 650-megawatt output of a normal coalfired power plant, which requires approx. 2 km2 of land surface, solar voltaic cells would need 122 km2. But that still would not be enough because without the sun everything stopsno matter how many km2 of solar calls one has. In addition, the area needed for infrastructure like streets, power lines, fences, maintenance buildings, transformer facilities, etc. has to be taken into account too. Allowing another 20%, the required area needed to replace the annual output of one coal-fired power plant grows to approx. 146 km2and this is possible only when the sun shines brightly. To say it in another way, we need the area of 73 coal-fired power plants to produce annually the calculated equal amount with solar power. Yet we would still be left with the huge problems of high costs, lack of availability and unsteady output. Former IBM Europe CEO Olaf Henkel told the German newspaper Bild on September 15, 2004:

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The enormous wind scam has brought us at least one thing: It has made a few manufacturers and operators rich through subsidies paid by the consumers. EU Commissar Andris Piebalgs, responsible for the sector of Energy, recently said: In a time of rapidly rising crude oil prices and climate change, renewable energy sources give us the opportunity that we must not pass up. They allow us to reduce CO2 emissions and to ensure our supply of energy. What could he possibly mean? Certainly not the previously described renewable energies. And it certainly was not intended as a Rhine Carnival joke. BIOFUELS Ethanol and biodiesel are set to provide 17% of Germanys fuel needs by 2020, according to the German Federal Government in its Meseberger Resolution. It is to be the wonder weapon against climate change: renewable primary raw materials as fuels. Much has been recently written on the subject. Corn for the Gas Tank, or A full tank can feed a person for an entire year etc. are some of the headlines seen during the spring of 2008. Biofuels can, once extracted, power automobiles, but not all automobiles. Indeed 3.5 million older cars in Germany alone would not survive even the relatively scant admixture of only 10% biofuel. But it could still work somehow. The question is at what cost? The cost, as is the case with all renewable energy, except for large-scale hydroelectric, would be extremely high. Currently biofuels can be made from food crops such as corn, grain crops like wheat, or rapeseed, palm oil or sugar cane. As is the case with other crops, these also have to be planted, irrigated, fertilised, cared for, harvested and transported before being refined into biofuel. The land previously used for food crops would then compete directly with land for biofuel plants. In addition, the energy content per kg of plant mass is very small (all renewable energies have the same problem: very low energy densities). This means huge masses of plants must be processed in order to get the same amount of energy you could get from a gallon of gasoline or a cubic meter of natural gas. According to agricultural scientist Professor Konrad Scheffer at the University of Kassel:16 Biodiesel delivers only a relatively minimal net yield. The energy needed to process the raw material is almost as much as the energy value of the end fuel product. Harmful gases are produced by growing rapeseed. Oleiferous fruit with their yellow blossoms produces up to 3.6 kg of nitrous oxide per hectare. With the biofuel yielded from 1 hectare of land, one can power a midsize car. But it was not reported how long and how far the car could be driven. Driven by the huge subsidies for biofuel crops, the amount of available, now less lucrative, food crops has decreased markedly. The result has been a drastic price spike in food commodities such as wheat, corn, rice, soybeans and other grain crops needed for food production. This hits the poorest of the poor the hardest. Of course it hits the rich industrial counties too, but in poor countries it becomes a matter of survival. In the spring of 2008, more than 100,000 citizens took to the streets in Mexico City to protest at the high prices of tortillas which are made of corn flour. Corn prices had almost doubled in a matter of a few weeks due to the ethanol boom. In Haiti the first fatalities occurred during unrest
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as hungry citizens rioted and vented their anger at traders and authorities. Swiss UN Special Envoy even termed biodiesel: a crime against humanity17 The German daily Die Welt reported: New YorkUN expert Jean Ziegler has called for a 5-year moratorium on the production of biofuels. Biodiesel is manufactured from grain crops, and has driven up food prices. More people have gone hungry. Using fertile land for producing biofuels is a crime against humanity, said Jean Ziegler. To produce 50 litres of ethanol one needs 232 kilograms of corn. This is enough to feed one child in Mexico or Zambia for a year, says the AP. And even if it did not directly threaten the sensitive food situation for millions of people, the manufacture of biofuels using plants is an extremely uneconomical venture. In 2007, at a convention for Nobel Prize winners in Lindau, Germany, Prof. Hartmut Michel reported1819 on the topic of biogas and biodiesel as follows: Biogas is 60% methane and the rest is mostly carbon dioxide. It comes from agricultural waste that is decomposed by methanogenic bacteria inside air-tight digesters. If the entire yield of a cornfield is converted into gas, one gains 4600 m3 of biogas per hectare. This is equivalent to the production of 1.7 kWh per square meter, or a continuous power of 0.2 watts per square meter. Not taken into consideration in the calculation is the fact that 40% of the generated energy is again needed just for planting and transporting the raw material. And because the sun at middle latitudes radiates energy at 150 W/m2, the total efficiency of the biogas system is less than 0.1 %. The Federal Republic of Germany itself needs 630 TWh of electric energy per year. To produce this amount of energy with biofuel, 560,000 km2 of cultivable land would be needed. However the entire country of Germany has only 357,000 km2of territory. The picture looks just as bad for biodiesel. Prof. Michel also reported at the same convention: Biodiesel is produced from rapeseed oil, which is converted to methylester. The yield is about 1200 litres per hectare. The energy yield can be further improved by sending the leftover waste material to a biogas production facility. About 62 % of the total energy extracted must be consumed for the production of the biodiesel itself. Only certain parts of the plant mass are used for producing bio-ethanol and biodiesel. In the BTL process (biomass to liquid) the entire biomass is used by burning it in low oxygen conditions to a mixture of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and water vapour. After separating the non-combustible component, one ends up with a synthesis gas, which can be converted to liquid hydrocarbons using the Fischer Tropsch process. This process is suitable for processing wood and wood waste. From 4 kg of wood, which consists mainly of cellulose, one can produce 1 litre of Fischer Tropsch diesel or sun diesel. Another way of using cellulose is its enzymatic decomposition to produce sugar, but the necessary enzymes are too cost-intensive to allow an economical production of bio-ethanol.
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Wissenschaft Rundschau No. 9, 2007 S 470 ff Wie sinnvoll sind Biotreibstoffe? (How much sense do biofuels make?)

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And he continues: . . . poplar and switch grass originating from Asia, which can be harvested every year, deliver the bulk of biomass at European latitudes, and yield approx. 0.5 litres of fuel per square metre. When compared to the energy invested for its production, the net energy gain is about 60%. However, to supply motor vehicles in Germany with BTL fuels, 200,000 km2 would be required. Thats 56% of the countrys entire area. But the German government is modest, and only plans to replace 17% of its fuel needs with biofuels. Using the above calculation, Germany will only need to plant 34,000 km2 with poplar. But the entire cultivable land area in Germany is only 171,000 km2. This means 20% of cultivable land is to be planted with poplar instead of food crops. In Germany, the back-to-nature slogan has now taken on a whole new meaning. The costs would be astronomical. But at least the farmers would be delighted because the prices for grains and food crops would skyrocket. Peter Brabeck, CEO of Nestle, the worlds largest food conglomerate, warned in an interview with the German newspaper NZZ am Sonntag20 of the devastating effects on food production: If you wish to replace 20% of our rising fuel needs with biofuels as planned, then there will be nothing left to eat. It is completely irresponsible and morally unacceptable that huge subsidies are paid to convert food into fuel for cars. Parliamentary State Secretary of the German Federal Ministry of Development Karin Kortmann (Socialist Party) told the German news agency dpa: The prices for sorghum and wheat have risen exorbitantly. If we dont change something soon, then we will have completely new cycles of poverty. Kortmann points to studies by the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington which shows that for every one percent increase in food prices, 16 million more people on earth become threatened with hunger. Thats political madness. That clearly illustrates the dimensions of what we are dealing with. In Indonesia land has been taken away from citizens for the purpose of planting palm oil trees. Currently 6 million hectares of palm oil trees have been planted in this Southeast Asian country. According to estimates from non-governmental organisations, this figure is expected to increase to 20 million hectares by 2020. According to Brabeck, the USA converted 138 million tonnes of corn into biofuel. The amount taken away from food production not only pushed up the price of corn, but for soybean and wheat as well. Agricultural land is becoming a scarce commodity. And so is water, which threatens to be in short supply, says Brabeck. 4000 gallons of water are needed to produce a single gallon of bio-ethanol. SUMMARY
1. Renewable energy is a metaphor that gives the impression there are low-cost, reliable and steady supply alternatives to power generated by nuclear plants, coal, fossil fuels or natural

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gas. This politically desired impression is false, misleading and inflicts much damage on our economies. 2. The production of electricity from wind and sunlight has major systematic deficiencies. These sources multiply the costs when compared to conventional power generation, and massively reduce supply consistency, reliability and availability and have to be backed up 1:1. Up to now in Germany, not a single conventional power plant has been taken offline because of fed-in wind and solar power. Back-up capacity has to be provided by gas-fired power plants. The gas needed to power these plants further increases foreign dependency. Supplying power to Germany with electric power from wind and solar plants dramatically increases the instability of the power supply, while greatly increasing prices for all consumers. This destroys the foundation of energy intensive industries and their jobs, e.g. raw materials industry. These job losses are not compensated by the fewer jobs generated by renewable energies. To the contrary, according to studies from various scientists, there is a net loss of jobs. Land-space requirements by renewable energy sources are gigantic. Solar energy needs 70 times more space than a coal-fired power plant, wind energy up to 240 times more space. For biofuels, the extremely high use of agricultural land leads to critical food shortages and price explosions. Soil leaching also results as the entire plant is used for bio-fuel production, and fertilisation from plant leftovers does not occur. The CO2 budget that results shows little or no net savings. The environmental results (measured with respect to pegging the countryside with wind turbines, land area requirements, manufacturing, etc.) also show no benefits. Furthermore CO2, whose emissions rights are traded, will simply be shifted elsewhere, often to less efficient countries. Biofuel is also considerably more expensive than fuel from oil. Food will be in shorter supply and thus cost more because of the competition from biofuels. The risks of civil unrest are substantial. Overall, the use of renewable energies neither has an impact on the climate, nor does it reduce our foreign dependency. To the contrary, they may even increase foreign dependency.

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