[Skybird]

Brace yourself everybody in Europe, winter is coming.

Achse-des-Guten writes:


The electricity crisis is here. And winter is coming

What has been announced for years by Rüdiger Stobbe and others in countless expert articles on Achgut has now come true : The Europe of the energy transition has a crisis-ridden power shortage. The first factories shut down due to a lack of electricity, citizens demonstrate against skyrocketing electricity prices, and large-scale blackouts threaten. The American news agency Bloomberg sums up the general situation:
“Europe is preparing for a harsh winter. An energy crisis that has been conjured up for years is forcing the continent to rely on the whims of the weather. With gas and electricity prices rising, countries from Great Britain to Germany have to hope for mild temperatures in order to survive the heating season. Europe lacks gas and coal, and if the wind doesn't blow, the worst scenario could arise: widespread power outages forcing companies and factories to close. "
The Viennese daily Die Presse reports under the heading “Europe in the electricity price shock”:
“This winter is going to be expensive. Shortly before the start of the heating season, Europe's gas storage facilities are as empty as they have not been for a long time. And the prices for electricity and natural gas on the stock exchanges climb to new record levels almost every day. Gas is three times more expensive today than it was at the beginning of the year. And anyone who wants to buy electricity wholesalers has to pay more than twice as much as they did a few months ago. "
On the Irish island - usually an electricity exporter - the network operators EirGrid (Republic of Ireland) and SONI (Northern Ireland) warn customers that there are “no more reserves”; “If something goes wrong”, there will be widespread power outages. The Moyle Interconnector, which is used to transfer electricity from the island of Ireland to Scotland, has been shut down to prevent electricity exports. In August, Irish newspapers reported that in July, up to 25 percent of the electricity needed in Ireland was temporarily produced by the only coal-fired power station, Moneypoint. The government decided in the spring to switch this off in the next few years in order to achieve its climate targets.
In Spain, which shut down seven of its 15 coal-fired power plants last year , there have been demonstrations against high electricity prices for months . In the Galician city of Vigo, the police arrested a 54-year-old who had thrown stones into the windows of the local branch of the energy supplier Naturgy . According to press reports, the man told the police that he was "unable to keep himself in check" after receiving his electricity bill.


Spain's government, in which the Marxist party Podemos is also involved, announced this month that it would lower the electricity tax from 5.1 to 0.5 percent. In addition, it wants to tax energy suppliers more heavily and has set maximum prices for the price of natural gas that end consumers have to pay. In other words, it wants to drive energy companies into bankruptcy.
In the UK , the Guardian newspaper reports :
"Record energy prices have forced two fertilizer plants in the north of England to close and steel mills to a standstill."
The paper calls this one of the "clearest signs that the energy crisis in Europe could deal a blow to the economic recovery". It also says:
“The US fertilizer manufacturer CF Industries has stopped production at its plants in Billingham in Teesside and Ince in Cheshire, which employ around 600 workers, due to soaring gas prices, which have successively reached record highs across Europe in recent weeks. Goldman Sachs, a major commodities trader, warned heavy industry across Europe was at risk of power outages this winter, especially if there were frosts across Europe and Asia by 2022. The warning came when UK Steel, the industry trade association, said steelmakers were already forced to stop working during peak electricity demand due to market prices for electricity. The energy price shock led to calls to UK ministers toUrgent action to protect homes and businesses as governments across Europe push bailout deals to help energy consumers weather the coming winter. "


In Norway, the fertilizer company Yara also had to close a factory because the price of natural gas is too high. The British meat industry association warns that there is no longer enough CO2 as a result of the closed fertilizer factories. This is a by-product of the natural gas splitting in the fertilizer factories and is needed, among other things, for stunning animals before slaughter. Now there is also a threat of meat shortages.
In an “ explanatory text ” for the population, the British government explains what it believes are the causes of the trouble. There is talk of the world economy and especially Asia using more gas in the course of the "reopening after the lockdown", which is why there is less of it for the British. Then the winter was also cold. And finally, the “weather” has recently been unfavorable again. Why is it winter again on the island? It is not explained. What is meant is something that should not be said: the wind has not played along lately. Because the wind did not blow as required, the electricity has to be generated elsewhere. The UK electricity mix on September 18, 2021, 9 p.m .: nuclear 16.9%, natural gas 48.6%, coal 1.7%, wind 14.1%, solar 0.0%, hydropower 0.5%, import 11 , 1%, memory 1.0%, other 0.5%.
Now a slack in the wind market inevitably leads to exploding natural gas prices - especially since not only Great Britain depends on natural gas as the primary energy source, but all countries in the world that are treading the path of "renewable energies" and building Potemkin villages out of wind turbines.
A good example of this is - alongside Germany - the US state of California, which presents itself as a state that leads “the nation on the way to the future of 100 percent clean energy”. The truth is that California is the United States' largest importer of electricity . Where does the imported electricity come from? Mainly from the Intermountain Power Plant , a coal-fired power plant in Utah. At the same time, California and the other two democratically governed states on the west coast - Oregon and Washington State - are resisting the construction of a terminal with which coal from the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming could be shipped to Asia. The result: The coal workers in the Powder River Basin lose their jobs. As Hillary Clinton announced in 2016 : "We will still make many coal workers unemployed."


Because the wind is only a little more reliable than the promises made by politicians, the reliable electricity that nuclear and coal-fired power plants used to provide has to be generated by burning natural gas. And that is a scarce - and expensive - good.
On June 30, the British government announced that the “coal exit” had been brought forward by one year to October 2024. Energy and Climate Change Minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan said :
“Today we are sending a clear signal around the world that the UK is about to put coal-fired power in the history books and that we are serious about decarbonising our electricity system so that we can meet our ambitious, world-leading climate goals. Britain's net zero future is powered by renewable energy, and it is this technology that will fuel the green industrial revolution and create new jobs across the country. "
Now it's time to take the command back. The remaining coal-fired power plants would be paid "huge sums" to "keep the lights on," writes the Guardian .
In the UK, many electricity traders are now bankrupt because the current wholesale prices they have to pay are well above the limit set by the government in January 2019 for end users . Now the interventionist government is trying to persuade the not yet bankrupt suppliers to accept hundreds of thousands of new customers. "Unfortunately, small suppliers are feeling the pressure of suddenly rising gas prices," tweeted Economics Minister Kwasi Kwarteng on September 19; If necessary, the government will set up a “special administrator” together with the network operator so that all British people will continue to be supplied with electricity.
Further reports on the situation:

• Amos Hochstein, the US State Department's energy security officer, worries that Europe's natural gas stocks will be too low before the start of the heating season. "If the winter gets cold, they are not enough." Shouldn't this concern rather be on the mind of the German government?
• Italy's electricity prices will soon be increased by 40 percent. "In the last quarter, electricity prices rose by 20 percent and in the next they will rise by 40 percent," said Roberto Cingolani, Italy's Minister for Ecological Transition, at a trade union conference. "It has to be said. We have to face it. This happens because the gas price is rising internationally and because the CO2 price is rising. "
• Javier Blas, the energy correspondent for Bloomberg News, tweeted : If you convert the current price of natural gas into a price per barrel of oil using a conversion formula commonly used in the markets, you get a price of 150 US dollars per barrel - more than the previous record in the year 2008.
• Steam coal prices in Asia have climbed to a 13-year high . Newcastle, Australia's benchmark has more than doubled this year. "If demand is rising but there is no supply to respond, that's what comes out," said Andrew Cosgrove, mining analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence.
• A state-run Chinese newspaper warns that Chinese power plants will not be able to buy enough natural gas or coal for the winter. Electricity rationing threatened.
• According to the Association of Coal Importers (VdKI), coal-fired power generation in Germany rose by 35.6 percent in the first half of the year compared to the previous year. The association cited cold weather and less wind as reasons.
• A Dutch court in June a judgment like , after which the oil and gas company Royal Dutch / Shell violated the "human rights" because it contributes to "climate change". The company must reduce its "emissions" faster, so the court. In order to exacerbate Europe's energy and electricity price crisis, the Netherlands decided in 2019 to end gas production by 2030. The Netherlands are Europe's largest gas producer and supply around a third of the natural gas consumed in Germany.
• Three activists from the eco-hedge fund Engine No. 1 was chosen , although it only holds 0.02 percent of the shares. Engine No. 1 wants Exxon-Mobil to put climate change at the center of its business decisions.
• In Australia, a court ruled in May that the government had to take into account its "obligation to children", who are "harmed" by "climate change", in the approval process for the expansion of a coal mine.
• The European Court of Justice has ordered Poland to pay a fine of 500,000 euros for every day the Turow open-cast lignite mine continues to operate in the Polish-German-Czech border area. The license for the open pit was extended in 2020 "without the necessary environmental impact assessments". Polish energy providers are expected to have to raise electricity prices by 40 percent next year. Poland's government is planning a law that will oblige suppliers to state on their electricity bills how much of the electricity price is caused by the EU's electricity policy.
• In Greece, the government plans to lower electricity and gas prices for citizens through subsidies. “There is an international energy crisis,” said Energy Minister Kostas Skrekas. "Our government has decided to support those whose bills are increasing." Because Greece depends on transfer payments from the EU, this leads to the interesting situation that consumers in Germany are paying ever higher taxes for energy so that it becomes cheaper in Greece.

For the current energy crisis in Europe, one can refer to many individual events that exacerbate the situation. In some places, power plants are out of order for maintenance work, the power cable between France and England was damaged in a fire and the Russian state-owned company Gazprom is supplying less natural gas in order to put pressure on Germany to bring the Nord Stream 2 pipeline into operation more quickly. But these are all details. The big picture is that politics deliberately sabotaged the energy supply. Coal and nuclear power plants were shut down. Obtaining liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the USA has never been an issue for European politics. LNG is sold through long-term contracts and Europe has not signed anybecause it relies on Russia. That is why, when the wind is not blowing, the continent no longer only depends on Russia for heating (it has always been that way), but also for electricity generation.
In the absence of nuclear power plants, coal is the only guarantee of a secure electricity supply in Europe. But above all, a worldwide war is being waged against them. Corporations submit to the dictates of the ESG , in English: environment, social and corporate governance. ESG has little to do with "social", it essentially stands for the demonization of the energy sources coal, oil and gas. When mining companies publish their quarterly results, ESG is now a main topic. Anyone who does not collect enough ESG points will be punished. For example, many insurers refuse to do business with corporations that have anything to do with steam coal or the extraction of oil from tar sands.
The big mining companies BHP, Rio Tinto and Anglo American are therefore withdrawing from coal production or have already done so. Joe Kraft, the chairman of the board of the American energy company Alliance Resource Partners, said at the presentation of the quarterly results in July that his company had to pay twice as high interest as comparable companies because of its coal production, namely currently nine percent. The distribution of the last investment certificate, with which investors could bet on a basket of coal stocks - the VanEck Vectors Coal ETF - was discontinued in December 2020. The financial service provider feared for its reputation.
On the other hand, China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Japan are planning to build 600 new coal-fired power plants. In China, a 1,800-kilometer railway line was inaugurated in 2019 , which cost around 25 billion euros and is only there to bring coal from Inner Mongolia to China's southern provinces.


Nevertheless, one can read again and again in the press and on the websites of green lobby associations that coal is being phased out. Because wind power and solar energy are "much cheaper", coal will no longer be needed or desired by anyone at some point.
Because I never understood how wind turbines and solar systems that only produce electricity sporadically can replace natural gas, coal and nuclear power, I asked the Federal Environment Ministry. A spokesman explains to me:
"For the acceptance of the energy transition and for Germany as a business location, security of supply must indeed be guaranteed, even in an electricity system with 100 percent renewable energies until around 2040. This can only succeed if the expansion of renewables is much more ambitious than this so far is the case. For almost a year now, the BMU has been calling for the expansion rate to be doubled by 2030 compared to the expansion path now set in the EEG 2021. After all, it is important to replace the electricity that is no longer available from nuclear and coal with solar and wind energy and not with gas-fired power plants. "
That means: If, as in the last few months, the wind doesn't blow enough, more wind turbines are needed. So when the wind as by Rüdiger Stobbe shown , has produced the electricity consumed in the last week temporarily only two percent, we need - how much more wind turbines? Fifty times as many as now?
It's going to be difficult. That is why the spokesman for the Federal Environment Ministry adds in his email:
“In addition, supply and demand must be better coordinated and the flexibility of demand and generation must be increased significantly. In addition, the German power grid and cross-border exchange capacities must be expanded and improved. This increased exchange with neighboring European countries not only increases the reliability of the electricity supply with renewable energies, but also strengthens the security of supply in all European countries and, since fewer reserve capacities need to be kept in total, it is also cost-effective. In addition, electricity storage facilities and gas-fired power plants will also be used - but in the long term, gas-fired power plants will only be used if they are operated with renewable gases or green hydrogen. "
Let's look forward to what the future has in store for us with its electricity storage systems and green hydrogen. The flexibility of demand already exists: If there is not enough electricity, industrial plants are switched off. In the future, this will also affect small customers. Better to buy a diesel generator now, with which you can then charge the battery of the electric car.
The war on oil, gas, and coal has many similarities to the war on drugs. In either case, it is difficult or impossible for the state to take action to reduce demand . What the war is against is the offer . The war on drugs does not mean that there is no cocaine or that it is not used, it just makes it expensive . This also applies to the EU's energy policy. By outlawing the energy sources coal and gas, it does not reduce their consumption, but only ensures that the price rises. So the only thing it achieves with it is to reduce the purchasing power of the population, to make people poorer than they would be without this policy.