Germany’s New Morgenthau Plan

Two Norwegian owned gas-fired power plants in northern Germany, critical to complementing the nation’s planned wind power capacity when the winds aren’t blowing, will be shut down. Because they’re operating at 20% capacity, they are not economical. The result of the shutting down of these two massive plants will be that the power will simply go out when the wind isn’t blowing hard enough.

Financial Times Deutschland reported:

"We will possibly need to make more power intervention," [Ed.: subsidies] said a spokeswoman for network operator Tennet. Of the failure of the two gas-fired power plants in the north: "If it were up to southern Germany, the situation would be difficult." Because of high wind power capacity in the North German Plain, the gas-fired power plants are seldom used, found Tzschoppe’s closure plan report. The two plants combined generate nearly 1,000 megawatts of power - almost as much as a nuclear power plant. Best run in operation 1000 to 2000 hours per year, they have been running only a few hundred hours.

Plans on track to deindustrialize? Yes. In more ways than one, we finally get to see the structured enfeeblement of an advanced society in action.

The Federal Network Agency has not scheduled a closing date of the Statkraft plants. After last week’s submitted monitoring report, the Authority expects to terminate in addition to about 3,000 megawatts of nuclear power plants are coal power from the grid in 2013, but no gas-fired power plants. Power shortages threaten the network, especially in southern Germany.

And now for the ugly truth: business defined by political goals fail.

But in the face of high gas costs and relatively low electricity prices were to achieve even with new gas-fired power plants currently barely adequate margins indicated Tzschoppe.

And what it all boils down to is the money that isn’t there, which “to save the planet” will become a cost that they will have to drop on the foot of a public that doesn’t have much of a choice in where their power comes from.

The price of electricity would have to reach reach 85 to 90 euros per megawatt hour in order to justify investments in new gas-fired power plants - about 50 percent more than it costs now.

The exhausted and angry postwar allies couldn’t have done any better.