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I have high hopes for solar energy as an important part of tomorrow’s energy portfolio. As Quartz whimsically puts it, “2012 was a very good year for sunshine.” US solar installations jumped 76% to 3,313 megawatts as the price of photovoltaic panels fell by 41% from a year earlier. Economist Noah Smith think that “within the decade, solar could be cheaper than coal. Within two decades, cheaper than gas.”
Wonderful.
Of course, the temptation is great to use subsidies to hurry the future along. This has been the case in Germany, to unfortunate results, according to Der Spiegel:
New numbers issued by the pro-industry Rhine-Westphalia Institute for Economic Research (RWI) will only add fuel to the fire. The experts calculated the additional costs to consumers after more solar systems were connected to the grid than in any other previous month in December. Under Germany’s Renewable Energy Law, each new system qualifies for 20 years of subsidies. A mountain of future payment obligations is beginning to take shape in front of consumers’ eyes.
According to the RWI, the solar energy systems connected to the grid in 2011 alone will cost electricity customers about €18 billion in subsidy costs over the next 20 years. “The demand for subsidies is growing and growing,” says RWI expert Manuel Frondel. If all commitments to pay subsidies so far are added together, Frondel adds, “we have already exceeded the €100 billion level.”
The RWI also expects the green energy surcharge on electricity bills to go up again soon. It is currently 3.59 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity, a number the German government had actually pledged to cap at 3.5 cents. But because of the most recent developments, RWI expert Frondel predicts that the surcharge will soon increase to 4.7 cents per kilowatt hour. For the average family, this would amount to an additional charge of about €200 a year, in addition to the actual cost of electricity. Solar energy has the potential to become the most expensive mistake in German environmental policy. Berlin energy economist Georg Erdmann, a member of the monitoring group on the energy transition appointed by Chancellor Merkel, views the expansion of solar energy as a threat to the planned nuclear phase-out.
So let me see if I understand this. When you employ more energy sources that are very expensive, the cost of power goes up? Mein Gott, was für eine Überraschung!
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“we have already exceeded the €100 billion level“…
Mere pocket change anymore…
Through the largesse of the Obama administration $192B extorted tax dollars was ‘lent‘ to a single foreign car company…
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Beware of quoting the “rated” solar panel capacity because actual captured energy is quite limited. Take Germany for instance.
Germany is ill-suited for solar energy as it is at 50 degrees North latitude and has essentially no useful sunlight in the 5 winter months. There are only 1550 hours of sunshine per year in most German cities or only 17% of the year. Of that amount, only about half of that is strong enough and useful to generate power (low intensity or low angle of the sun to the panels).
For about 4 months, there’s only about 2.5 hours of sunshine per day and that sunlight is so low in intensity and so low on the horizon that there is very little energy can be captured. Even in summer, there is 7 or 8 hours per day of official sunshine, but early morning and late afternoon sunshine is too low intensity to be useful for solar energy generation.
Installed solar panels might have a large “rated” capacity in full sunshine, but actual captured energy in such a climate is very small in Germany. This means that, if you’ve installed 1 megawatts of solar panels capacity, then it only generates that amount of power something like 8% of the time. With that amount of utilization, it is even more unlikely that solar panels will EVER be economic in Germany.
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I just wrote a blog to talk about how Solar energy in Germany is a waste of money:
Germany’s Solar Projects are a Bust at
http://gulfcoastcommentary.blogspot.com/2013/03/germanys-solar-projects-are-bust.html
Thanks! Enjoy!
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