Environment & Energy

... economy is collapsing under the weight of high electricity prices, so much so that the Government needs to subsidize electricity costs for industry, with residential customers bearing the weight.

Energy prices push up inflation in Germany and Spain ahead of ECB decision

German government to subsidize industry’s energy prices in bid to revitalize economy

German minister urges nuclear rethink as energy prices soar

The reason is that so called "renewable energy" requires redundancy, and that the redundant systems, the coal and gas plants in Germany, cannot recover their capital costs during the periods which the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, but needs to keep the stranded assets available for long periods of Dunkelflaute, a word the Germans needed to invent to describe when they can't get energy and need to burn fossil fuels and dump the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere, killing people.

Redundancy, requiring two systems when one can do the same job, is obviously expensive. The Germans need to pay people to sit around and do nothing for periods of windy daylight so that in the early evening hours - when power demand peaks on most grids - on cold dark winter nights, they can turn their expensive and dirty crap on.

It is unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable that this easily dismissed and often chanted lie persists. It's obvious that antinukes know zero about energy and its costs, the biggest cost being the external costs of fossil fuels about which, again, antinukes couldn't care less.

Can't these people read?

The United States, in a 20 year period between 1965 and 1985, when many of the world's best computers were less powerful than an apple watch, built more than 100 reactors while providing the least expensive electricity in the industrial world.

This rote chant that so called "renewable energy" - which is just lipstick on fossil fuel dependence - is "cheap" is a clearly dishonest and very dangerous lie and one that can be easily dismissed by just looking at the news.