Germany has Officially gone Looney Tunes

Perhaps instead you can look at my posting instead to see that it was not a statement of fact but a sarcastic question instead!!!!!!!!!!!!

The below just prove that nothing is ever simple however France is a net exporter of electric power on a very large scale using imports for short time periods of high demands instead of building more peak demand generators themselves

And my come back to that direct post was were is France north of Germany? Meaning that they could move to France to solve that problem not that France is north of Germany.

Export-Import of electricity from our "northern" neighbour country (source: see above)

I'm still cracking up over France being north of Germany.

hamburgboy apparently always drove the wrong direction from Schiphol to get to Hamburg.

Aug 15 (Reuters) - Norwegian utility Statkraft said on Thursday it had idled two gas-fired power plants in Germany that were incurring losses, after German utilities also announced similar closures this week.

E.ON and RWE said they would idle or shut thousands of megawatts of conventional gas and coal power capacity due to falling wholesale electricity prices and a surge in subsidized renewable power.

"Short-term power prices have continued to fall (in Germany), worsening the margin between power and gas prices," Yngve Froeshaug, Statkraft's vice-president for investor relations, told a conference call.

"Due to this, our gas power plants in Knapsack and Herdecke for the time being are out of production - that is in the wet reserve," he added.

"Wet reserve" means the plants could be restarted in a relatively short time in case market conditions change, he said.

Both plants were commissioned in 2007 and have a combined installed capacity of 1,200 MW. Statkraft co-owns Herdecke plant with Mark-E.

Statkraft shut its older, less efficient 510 MW Robert Frank gas-fired power plant near Dusseldorf earlier this year and a 450 MW power plant in Emden last year, just three years after taking them over as a part of asset swap with E.ON.

The state-owned company took a 2 billion Norwegian crown ($340 million) impairment charge on its German gas power plants in 2012.

"It's hard to comment on what will happen in the future, but looking at the total gas portfolio in our balance sheet, it's a fairly small part," Statkraft Chief Financial Officer Jens Bjoern Staff told the conference call, when asked about further impairements on the German assets.

Out of its total installed generating capacity of over 17,000 MW, gas-fired assets including the mothballed units account for just over 2,000 MW.

While wholesale prices in Germany slid by 20 percent during the first half of this year, prices in Statkraft's core Nordic market rose by over 20 percent. ($1 = 5.8827 Norwegian krones) (Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis; editing by Jane Baird)

I suspect that what has happened is that the deep recession in all areas of Europe not Germany has resulted in power being cheap to import into Germany, that the low power prices are actually a sign of trouble. France in particular is a basket case so their massive nuclear generation capacity is likely being sold to germany cheap.

Do you have ANY idea?

However, the industry association for large corporate and industrial users in Germany, VIK has said that the rise of power exports in Germany was a sign that the country's energy switchover has not been a success. Their industry association stressed that wind and solar utilities frequently generated electricity when there was no immediate demand and that eco-friendly power was pushing gas-driven plants out of the market, although these were still needed when the wind wasn't blowing or the sun wasn't shining.

Germany, Europe’s largest energy consumer—and the world’s seventh-largest—seems to be running out of politically feasible sources of power.

At a summit last week, EU leaders pledged to reduce their reliance on Russia for energy supplies. This isn’t an immediate crisis: No matter how tense things get, Russia isn’t likely to eliminate 14 percent of its export earnings by cutting off Europe’s energy supply. If Moscow decides to punish Ukraine by withholding gas supplies or raising prices, there are now alternate supply routes for getting the gas to Western Europe. And thanks to a milder-than-normal winter, gas reserves are currently high.

But in the long term, countries like Germany would likely feel in a better position to deal with Russia if they weren’t dependent on it for one-third of their oil and natural gas. Unfortunately, none of the country’s other options looks that great either.

Germany is one of the few countries in the world that seems to be sticking with its post-Fukushima pledge to wean itself off of nuclear energy. It plans to have all of its nine remaining nuclear plants offline by 2022.

Germany is also in the midst of a push, known as the Energiewende, to have all of its energy supplied by renewable sources by 2050. Unfortunately for that goal, the country’s once-booming solar energy industry has essentially collapsed over the last three years thanks to falling state subsidies and competition from cheaper Asian rivals. The EU has also opened an investigation into the country’s green energy subsidies, and a parliamentary commission recently recommended scrapping them entirely amid concerns about efficiency.

Despite Angela Merkel’s government’s focus on green energy, the country’s coal use actually hit its highest level since 1990 last year. With no conventionally extractable natural gas on its own, some are also recommending that the government consider hydraulic fracturing in Germany, which the government currently opposes on environmental grounds.

All of Merkel’s government's goals—shifting to renewable energy, weaning the country off Russian gas, reducing the risk of nuclear accidents—have been admirable, but doing them all at once raises some questions about how exactly the country plans to keep the lights on in the medium-to-long term.

Christoph Schmidt, chairman of the council of economic experts that advises the government, suggests that “the black zero should not be a fetish”. Germany’s municipal governments, not the federal one, should be the ones to raise public investment. But the bigger problem, he thinks, is that private investment is too low. In a free-market economy such as Germany’s, the government cannot command firms to invest more at home than abroad. If businesses have chosen another course, he says, it must be because, for whatever reasons, they find Germany an unrewarding place for investment

One aspect you don't seem to be grasping in all of this is the fact that energy, especially fossil fuel energy, is being targeted for higher tax specifically to focus the mind on cleaner, greener energy in the future.