貧乏人には酷なドイツのエネルギー政策

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Germany's Energy Poverty: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good

By SPIEGEL Staff
Germany's agressive and reckless expansion of wind and solar power has come with a hefty pricetag for consumers, and the costs often fall disproportionately on the poor. Government advisors are calling for a completely new start.

Even well-informed citizens can no longer keep track of all the additional costs being imposed on them. According to government sources, the surcharge to finance the power grids will increase by 0.2 to 0.4 cents per kilowatt hour next year. On top of that, consumers pay a host of taxes, surcharges and fees that would make any consumer's head spin.



In the near future, an average three-person household will spend about €90 a month for electricity. That's about twice as much as in 2000.




Consumer advocates and aid organizations say the breaking point has already been reached. Today, more than 300,000 households a year are seeing their power shut off because of unpaid bills.



It is only gradually becoming apparent how the renewable energy subsidies redistribute money from the poor to the more affluent, like when someone living in small rental apartment subsidizes a homeowner's roof-mounted solar panels through his electricity bill. The SPD, which sees itself as the party of the working class, long ignored this regressive aspect of the system. The Greens, the party of higher earners, continue to do so.

Germany's renewable energy policy is particularly unfair with respect to the economy. About 2,300 businesses have managed to largely exempt themselves from the green energy surcharge by claiming, often with little justification, that they face tough international competition



Experts believe that because of the more challenging conditions, the power offshore wind turbines generate will be consistently two to three times as expensive as on land. Although the wind blows more consistently at sea, this comes far from offsetting the higher costs.

The less visible costs are also high. There is little demand for electricity in the thinly populated coastal region. New high-voltage power lines will be needed to transport the energy to industrial centers in western and southern Germany. The government already estimates the costs of expanding the grid at €20 billion, which doesn't include the additional ocean cables for offshore wind power.

If the government sticks to its plans, the price of electricity will literally explode in the coming years.



When the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, gas-fired power plants and pumped storage stations are supposed to fill the gap. A key formula behind the Energiewende is that the more green energy is produced, the more reserves are needed to avert bottlenecks.




When it's sunny and people are most likely to head to the lake, solar power is abundant and electricity prices drop. This means the pumped storage station earns less money, so the power plant is shut off.





More and more wind turbines are turning in Germany, and solar panels are basking in the sun, yet the amount of pollutants and greenhouse gases emitted by smokestacks increased last year.


But the situation suddenly changed on June 30, when E.on received a letter from the grid operator associated with the plant, Tennet, and the regulatory agency. The unit, the letter read, was needed to maintain grid stability, and E.on was to reestablish the coal plant's operational readiness without delay.

This is one of the most curious developments in the story of German energy reform. The country's most heavily polluting plants are now also its most profitable: old and irrelevant brown coal power stations. Many of the plants are now running at full capacity.

This leaves a dirty stain on Germany's environmental statistics. While the amount of electricity from renewable energy rose by 10.2 percent in 2012, the first year of the new energy policy, the amount of electricity generated in hard coal and brown coal plants also increased by 5 percent each.

　原発廃止で、風力発電、太陽光発電に転換したのはいいが、光熱費が、２０００年のころに比べて倍になっており、さらに、エネルギー税も逆進的、さらに、海上の風力発電の開発・利用も、かなりコストがかさむことになり、貧乏人には酷なことになっている、と。

　風がない日、太陽が出ない日に備えて、石炭火力発電も使わなくてはならず、クリーンエネルギー政策になってから、かえってＣＯ２の量は増えた、と。

The experts propose that the government impose a green energy quota on energy providers, and gradually increase this quota in accordance with their targets for renewable energy production.





To prevent energy providers from cheating the quota model, Sweden requires them to submit a certain number of green energy certificates. Each certificate represents one megawatt-hour of clean electricity. Those that cannot prove they have met their quotas are slapped with a hefty fine.

The rest is left up to supply and demand, based on the usual rules of the market economy. When the amount of green energy being generated is low, there are fewer certificates on the market and their price increases. This, in turn, gives investors an incentive to build additional wind turbines or solar arrays. They can also invest their money in storage systems, which make energy production more efficient. Or they can invest in technologies that play no role in Germany today but are being studied elsewhere in the world.

For Swedish Energy Minister Anna-Karin Hatt, the greatest benefit of the quota model is that it contains few bureaucratic restrictions. The government defines the objective, but not the method.

　もっとも、コストに関しては、スエーデン型が見込みがあるらしい。

　政府が目標を設定して、あとは私企業に自由競争で、もっとも効率のよい手段を選択させて、電力を供給し、コスト削減に成功しているが、ドイツとは、地理的、社会的、政治的環境が違うので適用可能か、どうかは、不明である、と。