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Europe's green energy disaster
EU members states have spent about €600 billion ($882bn) on renewable energy projects since 2005, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Germany’s green energy transition alone may cost consumers up to €1 trillion by 2030, the German government recently warned.
These hundreds of billions are being paid by ordinary families and small and medium-sized businesses in what is undoubtedly one of the biggest wealth transfers from poor to rich in modern European history. Rising energy bills are dampening consumers’ spending, a poisonous development for a Continent struggling with a severe economic and financial crisis.
Spain is a particularly cautionary tale. By failing to control the cost of guaranteed subsidies, the country has been saddled with €126bn of obligations to renewable-energy investors.
Now that the Spanish government has dramatically curtailed these subsidies, even retrospectively, more than 50,000 solar entrepreneurs face financial disaster and bankruptcy.
More than half of the world’s solar panels are installed in Germany. .....As wealthy homeowners and businesses owners install solar panels on their homes and commercial buildings, low-income families, living in rented apartments, have to foot skyrocketing electric bills. Many can no longer afford to pay, so the utilities are cutting off their power......German CO2 emissions have been rising for two years in a row as coal is experiencing a renaissance. But CO2 emissions in the EU as a whole are likely to rise because of increased coal burning at power stations.
http://www.thegwpf.org/benny-peiser-europe-pulls-plug-green-future/
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No. I favour coal, gas and nuclear power stations.
Solar power is useful only for powering aircon units in hot countries - and is a very expensive way of doing that.
Wind power is useless.
The facts
Agree 100%.
The only facts you need to know are that Green Energy can't provide the energy required.
I agree it can't, but it has to be a bigger part of the mix.
Although having said that, this is worth a butchers
http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/nevermind-germany-portugal-achieves-70-via-renewables/
Hydroelectric and Geothermal are not solutions that can be applied to any great extent in the UK.
not to mention global warming, but hey you no doubt don't believe that is happening, right?
I'm quite enjoying it at the moment.:)
Well, there hasn't been a rise in global temperature since 1997, so actually, no, it isn't happening.
As the original post pointed out, the billions spent on green energy is not reducing CO2 emissions.
Burning gas instead of coal reduces CO2 output by half, nuclear power produces virtually no CO2.
Then again, the evidence is piling up against the theory that CO2 drives the climate.
But that opinion is based on thinking that every major world scientific institution is wrong on climate change.
No it isn't.
A chocolate fire guard is still useless, even if you have a 2 year old child and you desperately need a fire guard.
If CO2 is a problem, the correct policy is to ramp up nuclear power as quickly as possible.
Ah, basing our case on lies, always a good start:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997/to/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997/trend/plot/none
Even Watts, one of the most prominent climate change sceptics, has recently admitted statistically significant warming in most temperature series over as little as the last 20 years.
The nature of statistics is that you'd need a huge rise to prove statistically significant warming over a shorter time, like trying to accurately calculate the average of two dice over too few throws.
And over shorter timescales the warming over the last few decades often reverses temporarily:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/SkepticFrame.jpg
But renewables do produce energy and nuclear is already very expensive without the price of Uranium being pushed up by more people building nuclear stations.
It doesn't really matter what the cause is, green energy isn't a workable answer.
I'm all in favour of wind energy and solar energy on the roof, but lets not kid ourselves they are going to make any difference.
What happens when the winds not blowing and there's no sun, we still need 100% back up, so you have to ask yourself, what's the point?
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/8-29052013-AP/EN/8-29052013-AP-EN.PDF But needs quite a lot to build the station in the first place. Then again, if you have to lie to support your case it would tend to show how wrong you are.
The wind is always blowing in some part of the UK. And the point is to generate and use renewable energy as much as we can.
But that doesn't stop the CO2 emissions, it just slows it down.
In the grand scheme of things, that pretty irrelevant, its not a solution.
What is required is a solution that provides constant predictable output.
Surely everything from tidal flood plains to offshore hydro-electirc and offshore windmills will be a big part of any UK green energy solution.
Although I think we should go with nuclear.
Hydroelectric schemes generally need mountains and a good head of water. We have a few hilly areas in Wales and Scotland but nothing on the scale that would generate the kind of torrents required for Hydroelectric dams.
We can't rely on Scotland anyway, they are an unreliable area economically (with their independence aspirations) and it would best to not plan any investment into that area.
Places like Norway and Iceland just have luck on their side that they have the kind of natural geography that can be tapped easily and cheaply.
Germany is burning more coal, and so are we. This is despite both countries having spent billions on wind farms. What does that tell you?
Nuclear power produces much the same CO2 as wind power.
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/nuclear-less-co2-than-solar-hydro-biomass/13074