Germany has Officially gone Looney Tunes

Hopefully your quota plan put in place to address the Sarrazin fiasco flops, I detest putting people in positions based upon reasons other than ability to do the job.

Merkel was also punishing Röttgen for failing in his job as environment minister. The environment ministry was founded in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster and became a key ministry within the German cabinet after Fukushima happened. Merkel's transformation from a physicist in favor of nuclear energy to a politician phasing it out virtually upgraded Norbert Röttgen overnight. He was given the task of organizing the switch towards alternative energy sources. The eight oldest nuclear reactors were taken off the grid instantly and without incident, at a time when the German public was constantly bombarded with new images and reports from Japan. But other tasks in the realm of energy politics remained unfulfilled.
The debate about final storage facilities for nuclear waste still continues today; there is still no solution for the cost of new electricity grids and no answer when it comes to the question of how to promote solar energy without having to pay high subsidies - all this combined makes for negative headlines the chancellor would rather not read. After all, her motive for making the move was to deliver proof to the world that big industrialized countries can handle phasing out nuclear power and making the transformation to alternative energy sources. Röttgen had to go, in part because these and other energy projects had come to a standstill.

Here we see that Merkel is not man enough

Hawkeye has no clue about the United States

I dont need to work very hard to show that Germany has a low tolerance for unapproved of by the state political views

Besides that, Röttgen really did a bad job - and Merkel as the Chancello does have the power to determine policy guidelines. And if some minister can't follow them .

Japan has gone completely nuclear free in far less time.

This is not what successful energy policy looks like.

Ceili wrote:

Japan has gone completely nuclear free in far less time.

Japan also has extensive electricity shortages which is causing corporations to flee the island for their production needs. This is not what successful energy policy looks like.

Japan has urged businesses and households in parts of the country to cut electricity use by up to 15% to avoid possible blackouts.

The country is facing power shortages this summer because its 50 nuclear reactors have been taken offline.

Public confidence in nuclear safety was shaken by the meltdowns at the Fukushima power plant, triggered by last year's earthquake and tsunami.

The call for electricity reduction will take effect from July to September.

This time around the move to save power is not mandatory, unlike cuts imposed in the eastern parts of the country last summer after the nuclear crisis.

'Appeal'
It is in the heavily industrialised area of western Japan, served by Kansai Electric Power, that customers have been asked to cut electricity usage by 15%.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura, after a government meeting discussing power shortages, said that there was a "need to widely instigate power-saving measures" due to the shutdown of nuclear facilities.

"The government will try hard to figure out how to implement the measures decided today so that the power savings will affect the economy and people's livelihood as little as possible," he said.

"But I would like to repeat here our appeal to the nation to save power this summer."

The beauty of it is, the Japanese people will comply and their government will deliver

I have faith in both Germany and Japan, two of the world's most successful nations.
Gripe all you want about them, but they put N. America to shame, in both their resolve and ingenuity.

Hell Facebook and such did not come out of those two countries either.

Real German electricity prices for households have increased 61% since 2000. One quarter of household costs now stems directly from renewable energy. Also, the increase is *not* because of increasing production costs (which have actually slightly declined since 1978).

The increase is due to dramatically increasing taxes, most noticeably from the Renewable Energy Act (EEG). In 2013 the EEG will increase 50% to 6.28 euro-cent (5.28 cents plus 19% VAT).

In June 2011, Chancellor Angela Merkel famously promised to keep EEG prices stable, but this promise has now clearly been broken. The German household will pay 24% of its electricity bill to renewables

Chancellor Angela Merkel and governors of German states Thursday failed to reach a deal to stop the steady rise in electricity prices, which threatens to turn the chancellor's dream of abandoning nuclear power into an election-year handicap.

The federal government and the states agreed to try to find a short-term solution in May to stop the continued rise of electricity prices this year, but put off any broader overhaul of the renewable energy law, which industry says is needed to fix the system, until after the election in the fall.

Ms. Merkel's government has been looking for a way to stop electricity prices from rising further before the election Sept. 22. Her environment minister, Peter Altmaier, suggested imposing a cap on a surcharge on electricity bills that is raised to finance the expansion of renewable energy production. But the idea created widespread uncertainty in the green energy industry, causing some companies to postpone investment, and met massive resistance from states invested in alternative energy.

Speaking at a news conference after the "energy summit" with the state premieres, Ms. Merkel pledged that subsidies for existing renewable energy producers wouldn't be cut, calling the move "an important signal that should calm investors."

Torsten Albig, a Social Democrat, and premiere of the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, welcomed the government's climb-down on cutting subsidies that would have hit off-shore wind farms and damped investment in his state.

"We want to do nothing that leads to uncertainty among citizens and the industry," he said.

The states led by the SPD, the main opposition in Germany's federal parliament, failed to win government agreement to cut taxes on electricity bills to ease prices for consumers by nearly €2 billion. Ms. Merkel said she was "skeptical" about any tax cuts.

The meeting in the chancellery was the latest effort by the chancellor and state premieres to stop electricity prices for households and businesses from spinning out of control as a result of Germany's push into renewable energy. Subsidies to pay for the expansion of renewable energy production such as wind and solar power are financed in part through a controversial surcharge on electricity bills.

Sudden fluctuations in Germany's power grid are causing major damage to a number of industrial companies. While many of them have responded by getting their own power generators and regulators to help minimize the risks, they warn that companies might be forced to leave if the government doesn't deal with the issues fast

It was 3 a.m. on a Wednesday when the machines suddenly ground to a halt at Hydro Aluminium in Hamburg. The rolling mill's highly sensitive monitor stopped production so abruptly that the aluminum belts snagged. They hit the machines and destroyed a piece of the mill. The reason: The voltage off the electricity grid weakened for just a millisecond.

Workers had to free half-finished aluminum rolls from the machines, and several hours passed before they could be restarted. The damage to the machines cost some €10,000 ($12,300).
In the following three weeks, the voltage weakened at the Hamburg factory two more times, each time for a fraction of second. Since the machines were on a production break both times, there was no damage. Still, the company invested €150,000 to set up its own emergency power supply, using batteries, to protect itself from future damages.

"It could have affected us again in the middle of production and even led to a fire," said plant manager Axel Brand. "That would have been really expensive."

Ambitious Goals

At other industrial companies, executives at the highest levels are also thinking about freeing themselves from Germany's electricity grid to cushion the consequences of the country's transition to renewable energy.

Likewise, as more and more companies with sensitive control systems are securing production through batteries and generators, the companies that manufacture them are benefiting. "You can hardly find a company that isn't worrying about its power supply," said Joachim Pfeiffer, a parliamentarian and economic policy spokesman for the governing center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

Behind this worry stands the transition to renewable energy laid out by Chancellor Angela Merkel last year in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Though the transition has been sluggish so far, Merkel set the ambitious goals of boosting renewable energy to 35 percent of total power consumption by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 while phasing out all of Germany's nuclear power reactors by 2022.

The problem is that wind and solar farms just don't deliver the same amount of continuous electricity compared with nuclear and gas-fired power plants. To match traditional energy sources, grid operators must be able to exactly predict how strong the wind will blow or the sun will shine.

But such an exact prediction is difficult. Even when grid operators are off by just a few percentage points, voltage in the grid slackens. That has no affect on normal household appliances, such as vacuum cleaners and coffee machines. But for high-performance computers, for example, outages lasting even just a millisecond can quickly trigger system failures