Germany’s relentless push into renewable energy has implications far beyond its shores. By creating huge demand for wind turbines and especially for solar panels, it has helped lure big Chinese manufacturers into the market, and that combination is driving down costs faster than almost anyone thought possible just a few years ago.
Electric utility executives all over the world are watching nervously as technologies they once dismissed as irrelevant begin to threaten their long-established business plans. Fights are erupting across the United States over the future rules for renewable power. Many poor countries, once intent on building coal-fired power plants to bring electricity to their people, are discussing whether they might leapfrog the fossil age and build clean grids from the outset.
A reckoning is at hand, and nowhere is that clearer than in Germany. Even as the country sets records nearly every month for renewable power production, the changes have devastated its utility companies, whose profits from power generation have collapsed.
For more than a decade, offshore wind has been viewed as the next big thing in the U.S. energy mix. In Europe, billions of euros have been invested in 82 offshore wind farms — 10.4 GW of capacity, according to the European Wind Energy Association — roughly equivalent to the power production of 10 large nuclear power plants. Meanwhile, the United States market stalled completely, mired in regulatory uncertainties, litigation, and lack of financing.
However, there are several reasons to believe the sector has reached an inflection point in 2015. Macro energy supply, economic considerations, and climate-related concerns support development of U.S. offshore wind projects now more than ever, particularly in the New England and mid-Atlantic regions. Traditional coal-burning power plants are rapidly being retired, and they’re not being replaced. Offshore wind is one of the few resources offering the necessary scale to fill the coming void. Wind energy is also becoming far less costly, given technology improvements, and is increasingly supported by federal and state policies addressing climate change.
How is Germany getting credit for this? The UK has spent billions on offshore wind over the past dozen years.
“A reckoning is at hand, and nowhere is that clearer than in Germany. Even as the country sets records nearly every month for renewable power production, the changes have devastated its utility companies, whose profits from power generation have collapsed.”
Ergo, renewable energy utilities should not be profit-driven. They should be nationalized, given a mandate to complete all necessary construction of a parallel system, and should be funded as a governmental service, not a pay-by-unit-use model.
Ergo, renewable energy utilities should not be profit-driven. They should be nationalized, given a mandate to complete all necessary construction of a parallel system, and should be funded as a governmental service, not a pay-by-unit-use model.”
I strongly suspect you’ve not been near North America in a very long while.
Uh, MM? GB resides in Burlington, Vermont, USA, which is about 100 miles south of Montreal, Canada and 300 miles north of New York City.
He has always been “near” North America. It’s his ideas about how we should be running our electrical power system that are perhaps a bit “far away”.
(But not as far out there as Elon Musk’s ideas about Mars colonization. GB’s ideas make much better sense.)
Why don’t we wait and see if Musk delivers on the Model 3, the Gigafactory and the PowerPacks?
It’s not like anyone is going to make it to Mars before 2030 and we could be in quite the pickle if some of our long-running problems here aren’t solved.
I agree.