High Energy prices ? Yawn.
Today the german newspaper FOCUS has released an article where BDI (Union of German Industry) complains about high energy prices:
My guess is that the people writing at FOCUS or at the BDI have absolutely no idea about the economy. High prices generate high profits for investors and thus are good for the economy and the wealth of the people. We are all invested – aren’t we? Read it here:
https://orf.at/stories/3246014/
So in case you did not notice in the last 2 years our bureaucracies are here to do all the best for us.
If you the people (in this case INTRENEX GmbH) want to have a say, we must make it clear that you simply do not have the excellent overview of the experts.
For the fun of it I add an email that I received 6 years ago from the head of the Austrian Energy Agency at that time (5.6.2016):
“
Dear Mr Muncke,
Thank you very much for submitting your documents!
The list of questions you sent is extremely extensive and refers to many regulations that are not uniformly regulated in the individual EU member states.
The preparation and holding of a workshop on the subject areas you have named would therefore involve a great deal of time.
Due to our high workload with other orders this year, it is unfortunately not possible for us to make you an offer for this workshop.
I ask for your understanding!
I also looked through the documents for your business idea. It should be noted that the import of electricity from renewable energy sources from North Africa is an idea that has been around for a long time, but has always failed when it comes to implementation. The expansion of the infrastructure required for this (especially in the area of transmission networks) is a very long-term and cost-intensive matter that requires the cooperation of many states and companies. In recent years, the situation with regard to power generation from wind and photovoltaics in Europe – driven in particular by the German energy transition – has also changed massively. Due to the massive expansion in the green electricity sector and the price developments of PV generation, the idea of importing electricity from North Africa has lost much of its attractiveness.
Electricity customers can In Austria, for example, you can now buy 100% electricity from renewable energy sources for less than 4 cents/kWh (pure energy price). Owners of single-family homes can set up PV systems using subsidies and save costs by generating their own electricity (for one kWh of electrical energy that does not have to be drawn from the grid, the saving is around 20 cents/kWh (total electricity price)).
Customers who are unable to invest in their own system can participate in community systems via citizen participation models.
Your business idea is therefore in direct competition with attractive offers from other providers that have already been tried and tested and are available at any time, which makes implementation a very big challenge.
In this context, it might make sense to carry out a market environment analysis to check the competitiveness of your business idea.
I hope that my answer has been of some help to you and I wish you every success in your future work!
Best Regards …”
So here is my reply:
“
Dear Mr. ….,
Thank you for bothering to read and evaluate my model.
I was very pleased about the reference to a “market environment analysis”, although you have stated that you can not do anything for me at this moment. The result is also interesting because all of us know that EE is not about a “market” but about a “subsidy biotope” with an attached “paragraph jungle”.
This circumstance makes it necessary that I cannot simply go public with my model, but must ask important Institutes like yours for legal assistance in order to ensure legal certainty.
I didn’t ask you to explain to me how successful this biotope is, but to establish legal certainty with me.
You could answer a few questions yes or no of course, with a limited preparation, shake these out of the sleeve.
I have created the alternative answer option for this purpose, that further studies are needed. We can also do follow-up orders for example.
I dare say that I understand the “RE market” in Europe at least as well as you, because as we shall see, success for an
energy transition is absolutely not fixed. I don’t need to do the math for you, you know the facts of course yourself:
Germany is already having “good days” at 32% total utilization of RE with massive oversupply that it simply passes on to its neighbors. This year the price on the Leipzig electricity exchange temporarily was already at -13ct/KWh.
You don’t have to be an economist to see that a negative price is the road to ruin unless you get the loss from the state and thus replaced by the taxpayer, from an economic point of view it remains a loss.
As we can see, Germany’s neighbors have started to protest and limit German electricity exports and then we will have shutdowns in Germany. Then at least the profitability calculations of the RE Producers (and the FF producers!) will become problematic, not speaking of the deterioration of the miserable capacity factors.
When Germany goes further than the 45% RE with the current grid they will also soon get brown-outs, because the
Frequency stability will no longer be tenable. Also from the theory that storage technologies solve this problem
I don’t let myself be dazzled, because the harvest factor for maintaining an industrialized Civilization with EE plus storage no longer has enough net energy. Let alone that nobody wants to pay for thousands upon thousands of batteries which also cannot be operated economically.
But yes, a few Tesla batteries will do the trick. Yeah!
Only a global power grid can solve this problem and nobody in the world is standing up and wanting to address this problem because it cannot be financed using “a free market economy”, with a customer price of 4ct.
However, this only applies for for the small component of electrical energy from primary energy consumption. We haven’t even started thought about what we mean by traffic or process energy and the heat market. To electrify everything requires immense investments and depreciation as well as resources that we may not have anymore.
A possible solution must therefore also be a willingness to make sacrifices which is not to be had with the free market economy. The people in Germany are already at the limit of tolerance, what the disfigurement of the landscape has done in blind technological madness.
Since the beginning of the energy transition, Germany has not reduced its CO2 emissions a single iota except 1990 due to deindustrialization East Germany and 2009 by the Lehman crisis.
All this doesn’t look like a very big success to me.
Of course you know all this, but that needs to be sold as a success so that consumers are not disturbed in their buying mood, it is important to secure green jobs. With my suggestion there would exist a small possibility for the conference in Munich where Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Obama decided to achieve decarbonization by 2100.
Although I cannot guarantee that people will not turn this planet into a desert before that let alone that I still don’t know if it’s even legally for Europe. Let’s leave it at that, I’ll find someone who wants to help me.
Otherwise we just do what we can.
Greetings
M.Muncke”
Sorry for the quality of the translation. I do not want to waste much time on this.
So the list goes on and on.
I have not even earned a ball pen for my efforts of me in the last 6 and Dr. Gregor Czisch in more than 15 years of working on a solution to a very complex problem. Instead I paid a lot of money for lawyers (starting from GDPR to company legal administration and other regulatory bullshit) without ever moving a single brick.
Guys, simply go ahead. Hydrogen, green gas, and batteries will do it. That is absolutely clear. It has been worked on for decades by experts much smarter than me and Dr. G. Czisch. Rest assured that high prices also known as inflation is just a transitionary thing because our experts simlpy decided that it is so.
regards
M.Muncke
PS: About political correctness? Go figure!
I could go for a lot more fun like this but it is not really my style. It just itched me to get this out today.
We need to stay constructive on this thing on all levels of society!
We still have a window of opportunity here but it is quite small for a fat a* on a fluffy office chair.