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To: Eric who wrote (1513340)1/14/2025 4:08:59 PM
From: Wharf Rat  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1570334
 



To: Eric who wrote (1513340)1/15/2025 5:08:36 AM
From: Broken_Clock3 Recommendations

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2024 Registrations Of New Electric Cars Plummet 27.5% In Germany... "Petrol Dominates"

by Tyler Durden

Tuesday, Jan 14, 2025 - 10:30 PM

Authored by P Gosselin via the NoTricksZone

How’s the Green New Deal working out in Germany? Not very well at all.

Firstly, Germany has been in recession for almost 2 years now – thanks mostly to the policies of Economics Minster Robert Habeck (Green Party), who incidentally has no education in economics, business or finance. The guy just doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Secondly, German energy prices are among the most expensive in the world, and the German power supply has become more unstable than ever. Germany is now in a rapid deindustrialization tailspin.

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E-cars aren’t sellingAnother indicator that the Green New Deal is faltering badly: sales of new electric cars have plummeted 27.5%, reports Blackout News here, citing data from the Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA).

“Only 380,600 electric vehicles were newly registered. This corresponds to a decline of 27.5 percent compared to the previous year.”

“Diesel cars were even ahead of purely electric cars at 17.2 percent," reports Blackout News.

These figures show how far away Germany is from the government’s electromobility targets. According to the KBA, there were only 1.4 million electric cars on the roads at the turn of 2024/25, while the target is around 15 million by 2030.”

With the bad figures, it’s only natural that e-car proponents are calling for more subsidies in order to entice consumers to opt for e-cars, and higher taxes to punish those who refuse to cooperate by buying diesel or petrol engine vehicles, which are more reliable and cheaper.

Future remains bleak for e-mobility So what does the future hold? That of course will depend on the outcome of the coming February 23 national elections.

Currently the (fake) conservative CDU/CSU party are leading in the polls (29%) and are expected to win.

But a new government under chancellor Friedrich Merz would likely continue Angela Merkel’s disastrous green policies, albeit at a slower rate than the current socialist-Green government under Olaf Scholz.

Growing resistance, AfD on the riseHowever, Germany’s new conservative-libertarian AfD party, led by the charismatic Alice Weidel, is steadily closing the gap (22%), and today there’s even a chance of a major upset occurring come the end of February! The momentum is clearly on their side. Elon Musk called the AfD “Germany’s last hope.”

Though a victory by the anti-Green-New-Deal AfD party likely would not mean the chancellorship and thus a takeover of the reins of power, it would be another major setback for the ever increasingly unpopular green movement.

To make matters worse for the German green movement, President Trump will certainly bring energy prices down in USA, and thus further exacerbate Germany’s economic uncompetitiveness. Germany’s needs to wake up from its green fantasies.

In summary, the next four years don’t offer much hope for Germany and its crumbling green movement. To reach the set targets, authoritarian measures certainly would need to be enacted.



To: Eric who wrote (1513340)1/15/2025 5:09:52 AM
From: Broken_Clock3 Recommendations

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Greece Calls On EU for Fast Response to Surging Energy Prices By Charles Kennedy - Jan 14, 2025, 9:30 AM CST

Greece is urging the EU to move faster to address the high power and natural gas prices in the bloc that undermine its competitiveness alongside burdening households, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis wrote in a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen seen by Bloomberg News.

European wholesale electricity prices jumped in November to the highest level in 20 months, additionally burdening the key industries in major economies that had just started to recover from the 2022 energy crisis.

Major economies in Western Europe – Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy, have seen a surge in energy costs. Economies in east and southeast Europe, including Greece, have been suffering even more as energy prices have been higher than in Western Europe in recent months.




Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania have already called on the EU to discuss measures to relieve the high prices.

The Greek PM also wrote to von der Leyen in May 2024 urging the European Commission President “to make the Single Market more competitive and transparent for consumers, for a Europe that improves the living standards of its citizens”

In another letter seen by Bloomberg News, Mitsotakis wrote more recently,

“Prices are telling us we need to move faster but also differently — to think about new ways to tackle the problems that confront us.”

Mitsotakis is calling for better integration of the national grids and for additional measures to protect southeast Europe’s and the EU's natural gas security. The Greek PM also seeks limits to the costs of overregulating emissions.

“Shifts in the geopolitical landscape make this task even more urgent,” Mitsotakis wrote in the letter.

The European Union is getting ready to have natural gas hold a smaller share of the energy mix, but “we will depend on gas for at least two decades,” the Greek prime minister noted.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com



To: Eric who wrote (1513340)1/15/2025 5:18:44 AM
From: Broken_Clock4 Recommendations

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Wind Power Stalls as Coal Holds Strong in EU By Irina Slav - Jan 14, 2025, 5:00 PM CST
  • Last year, the European Union’s wind power generation capacity supplied a fifth of the electricity that the bloc consumed.
  • Some of the most wind-energy-friendly countries in Europe are failing to attract new bids in auctions.
  • This year, the UK will be spending more than $2 billion on curtailment payments to wind energy producers.


The European Union has been funding wind power as a priority in energy policy. Buildout has been fast and sizable—and yet the bloc remains more dependent on coal than wind. This dependence could deepen instead of vanishing because the pace of new capacity additions is slowing down.

Last year, the European Union’s wind power generation capacity supplied a fifth of the electricity that the bloc consumed, according to recently released data from WindEurope, the lobby group. WindEurope warned, however, that the newly added wind turbines in 2024 were a lot fewer than the EU needs to build every year in order to hit its own wind power targets for 2030.

“Europe is not building enough new wind farms. For 3 main reasons – a) most Governments are not applying the good EU permitting rules – they’ve got to follow Germany’s example here; b) new grid connections are delayed; and c) Europe is not electrifying its economy quickly enough. The EU must urgently tackle all three problems. More wind means cheaper power which means increased competitiveness”, WindEurope’s chief executive, Giles Dickson, said last week.

According to some transition advocacy outlets, things are not as grim as WindEurope paints them, however. Ember, for instance, recently suggested that Europe is on track to generate more electricity from wind turbines than it generates from coal—but for this to happen, it would need to keep building more of the turbines while retiring coal power plants faster.




Related: EU Foreign Policy Chief Seeks Lower Price Cap on Russia’s Oil

Coal generation in Europe last year dipped by 7% in 2024 while wind power generation rose by 3%, and if this year sees the same changes, wind would overtake coal, Ember said, adding that this would constitute a major transition milestone. It would be the first time a non-hydrocarbon source of electricity has generated more than a hydrocarbon source in a major consumption region, Reuters’ Gavin Maguire reported.

Whether this would happen, however, depends on two things, one of which is the weather, and the other is government funding for wind power projects. The slowdown in new additions suggests a decline in investor interest as wind installations become more expensive to build and return less money to operators and developers—in the UK last year, wind power operators were paid more to turn their turbines off than they were for electricity supplied to the grid. This year, the UK will be spending more than $2 billion on these curtailment payments—payments for wind energy not generated.

This could become a problem in the EU as well and is one of the limitations of wind energy along with solar. When there is too much output and no way to take the supply to demand sources, the electricity essentially gets wasted, but operators would need to get paid for their trouble operating the turbines—otherwise, a few curtailments later, they would be on their way to bankruptcy court, threatening the transition.

Yet there is also the simple issue of overcapacity, where Denmark offers a case in point. One of the most wind-friendly countries in Europe, Denmark last year boasted a record 58% of its electricity generation came from wind turbines. However, at the last government tender for new capacity, no bids were submitted—because with the breakneck capacity growth from recent years, returns have diminished enough to sap investor interest in new capacity.

Wind, like solar, has been hyped as the perfect energy source that generates electricity but not emissions—even though wind turbines feature a lot of hydrocarbon derivatives in their components. However, the weather dependency factor has been a limitation that is drawing more attention now that it has become more obvious during the winter Dunkelflaute in Europe. Another limitation—economics laws and, more specifically, the law of diminishing returns. One can build a thousand wind turbines, but when the wind doesn’t blow, these thousand turbines will generate just as much as a hundred—zero.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com



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