Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.
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Natural Gas NOW readers pass along a lot of stuff every week about natural gas, fractivist antics, emissions, renewables, and other news relating to energy. As usual, emphasis is added.
It’s amazing how, in just a few years, the world had caught up to what many of us were saying about the horrible green experiment known as the Energiewende:
A new report by consulting giant McKinsey finds that Germany’s Energiewende, or energy transition to renewables, poses a significant threat to the nation’s economy and energy supply.
One of Germany’s largest newspapers, Die Welt, summarized the findings of the McKinsey report in a single word: “disastrous.”
“Problems are manifesting in all three dimensions of the energy industry triangle: climate protection, the security of supply and economic efficiency,” writes McKinsey…
Germany has failed to even come close to reducing its primary energy consumption to levels it hoped. McKinsey says Germany is just 39% toward its goal for primary energy reduction.
Despite much hype, Germany still generates just 35% of its electricity from renewables. And if biomass burning, often dirtier than coal, is excluded, wind, water and solar electricity in Germany accounted for just 27% of electricity generation in 2018.
A German solar farm in front of a German coal plant. The idea is that solar will replace coal, but the reality is that coal plants are now more necessary than ever to back up the unreliable solar facility, which only produces energy intermittenly..
But McKinsey issues its strongest warning when it comes to Germany’s increasingly insecure energy supply due to its heavy reliance on intermittent solar and wind. For three days in June 2019, the electricity grid came close to black-outs.
“Only short-term imports from neighboring countries were able to stabilize the grid,” the consultancy notes.
As a result of Germany’s energy supply shortage, the highest observed cost of short-term “balancing energy” skyrocketed from €64 in 2017 to €37,856 in 2019.
“It can be assumed that security of supply will continue to worsen in the future,” says McKinsey…
