WILL CA GREEN-ENERGY POLICIES BACKFIRE LIKE GERMANY’S DID?
Will California’s new green energy regime suffer the same fate as Germany’s Energiewende?
In Europe, wholesale prices for solar and wind power have dropped below the cost to produce it. This has resulted in Germany having to rapidly build new polluting coal-fired power plants to offset the unanticipated losses from its shift to green power called Energiewende (German for “Energy Transformation”). Europe’s Energiewende has backfired resulting in its having to return to dependence on coal-fired power plants. Will California suffer the same fate of uneconomic green energy prices and a “deeply regrettable misinvestment” in green power?
This is a question I posed to Schalk Cloete, a chemical engineer and climate scientist who has morphed into an expert on the economics of green power. Cloete is a chemical engineer from Stellenbosch University in South Africa and now a research scientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
