New German solar rates reported by Reuters

Reuters reports the German government plans to announce a one-off 16-17% reduction in solar rates to take effect in April and adds:

Additional cuts to the subsidies will be made from 2011 if solar projects amount to more than 3,000 megawatts, said the sources and even more if they total more than 3,500 megawatts. Bigger subsidy cuts are planned for solar equipment on farm land.

A spokeswoman for the environment ministry said no decisions had yet been made. "That is planned for next week," she said.

In all likelihood, a market of three gigawatts would still be the largest in the world next year.

While the German Solar Industry Association (BSW) had been offering a one-off 4.5 percent reduction effective July 1, Frank Asbeck (CEO of Solarworld and BSW board member) stated a few months ago that an additional 15 percent reduction in 2010 would not be a problem.

Berlin-based photovoltaics publisher Solarpraxis writes that analysts from Commerzbank and LBBW (the State Bank of the German state of Baden-Württemberg) disagree. At the much anticipated meeting between politicians and industry on Wednesday, the bankers stated that such cuts would go too far and mainly benefit low-cost Asian competitors and that an ROI of less than seven percent would no longer provide sufficient investment security.

Consumer protectionists have warned that the money being devoted to photovoltaics is too great a burden on consumers, but a large majority of Germans (71% according to a survey reported by SolarServer) continue to support the current policy -- possibly because German law allows people who could once only be energy consumers to become energy producers themselves at a profit. Consumer protectionists may believe that they still represent the German public on this issue, but they may have failed to understand that Germans are no longer merely energy consumers.

From Q4 2008 two Q3 2009, some 2.4 gigawatts of photovoltaics was installed in Germany.

Gaux Louisiana!

No, I am not talking about how Louisiana probably has the best solar policy in the US at the moment (though I do talk about that here). Rather, I am talking about a proposal to stop Asian carp from taking over the Mississippi River and, apparently, Lake Michigan. While the northern states are trying to come up with a technical fix, Louisiana has proposed something that I -- a Louisiana native -- also immediately thought of, though the New Republic's Brad Plumer calls it an offbeat suggestion:

Why don't we just start eating Asian carp?

Of course we should eat Asian carp -- it moves, doesn't it? And while I am no fan of carp (it is a bony, somewhat fishy-smelling fish), there is nothing that a little seasoning can't do, as alligator pie demonstrates.

P.S. Yes, I know that everyone writes, "Geaux Saints," but the ge- in geaux produces a
voiced postalveolar fricative -- the zh- in the Chinese name Zhou or the second g in garage. We need the first g in garage, ergo no e after it.

Faveread: Schneier on security

If you are like me, you are tired of hearing about the attempted bombing on Christmas Day, especially because so much of the discussion -- especially in the US media -- is completely misleading. Don't even get me started on the various claims that we were never attacked while George W. Bush was in office. We are now to get these full-body scanners, even though they would not prevent such bombings.

For a more enlightened assessment, I highly recommend everything that security expert Bruce Schneier has written on the subject, especially his recent post, in which he points out all the things that worked:

The security checkpoints worked. Because we screen for obvious bombs, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab -- or, more precisely, whoever built the bomb -- had to construct a far less reliable bomb than he would have otherwise. Instead of using a timer or a plunger or a reliable detonation mechanism, as would any commercial user of PETN, he had to resort to an ad hoc and much more inefficient homebrew mechanism: one involving a syringe and 20 minutes in the lavatory and we don't know exactly what else. And it didn't work.

Yes, the Amsterdam screeners allowed Abdulmutallab onto the plane with PETN sewn into his underwear, but that's not a failure either. There is no security checkpoint, run by any government anywhere in the world, designed to catch this.

Importantly, his synopsis is invariably that we will simply have to learn to live with a certain amount of risk without panicking and giving up all of our freedoms:

The real security failure on Christmas Day was in our reaction. We're reacting out of fear, wasting money on the story rather than securing ourselves against the threat. Abdulmutallab succeeded in causing terror even though his attack failed.

If we refuse to be terrorized, if we refuse to implement security theater and remember that we can never completely eliminate the risk of terrorism, then the terrorists fail even if their attacks succeed.

Finally, isn't it rather fitting -- almost poetic -- that a Dutchman would prevent a bombing on a flight that started in Amsterdam? I just wonder why he had to cross over so many other passengers to get to the bomber.

Germany is now #2 world exporter

If you're in America, I think I know what you're thinking -- Germany moved up. But actually, China just overtook Germany as the world's biggest exporter. The Germans held the title from 2003-2008.

Think about what this means for a moment. Measured in terms of US dollars, the value of German goods exported exceeded the value of goods exported by every other country. Note that the figure does not represent a trade balance; imports are not deducted from the sum. Note also that the figure is given in absolute terms, not per capita.

A country with around 80 million people (Germany) therefore managed for six years running not only to out-export the United States, with around 300 million people, but also China, with around 1,300 million people.

Over the past few years, I have been including this fact in my presentations to unsuspecting American audiences (energy folks, and none of them ever knew Germany was #1) in an attempt to impress upon them that, while Americans are very concerned about keeping up with China, Germany has been easily beating China with only one 1/16 of the population. And the Germans have partly been doing so with renewables and energy efficiency.

I suppose I will now have to change those presentations ever so slightly.

58% of Germans oppose lower taxes

On the radio yesterday, I heard yet another thing that clearly makes Germans different than Americans: a majority of Germans oppose lower taxation. But that's not all -- while the greatest support for lower taxation was found among those earning less than 18,000 euros a year, the greatest opposition to lower taxation came from those earning at least 36,000 euros a year. In other words, the more you earn, the more willing you are to pay taxes -- at least in Germany.

This discussion is taking place against the backdrop of the incredible debt accumulated as the government (read: taxpayers) bailed out banks. The current governing coalition of Christian Democrats and Libertarians has, much like Democrats and Republicans in the US, promised to generate more taxes by "growing the economy" -- so you need to lower taxes in order to increase tax revenue. You know, fighting for peace, fucking for virginity, etc.

One reason why Germans are having none of it may be because the concept does not make sense to German media. Here is a 10-minute segment from the German Nightly News (from Oct 15, 2009), which only lasts a half an hour -- and that is including the weather:



Marietta Slomka, the moderator, totally slams this libertarian politician; she points out that, even according to his plan, they would have to come up with 86 billion euros, and he has only proposed to cut 10 billion from the budget, but if taxes are reduced as proposed he would have a shortfall of 35 billion euros. In other words, if this politician gets his way, he is actually going to increase the debt by 25 billion, not reduce it at all.

The United States would be a different country if politicians were taken to task like this on the nightly news.

Faveread: Clinton review

For some reason, former president Bill Clinton is back in the news. The London Review of Books (do you also find that you are making do quite well with book reviews these days rather than with the books themselves?) presents a rather interesting synopsis of a book showing how Clinton was upset about media attacks on his person, but not about attacks from Republicans -- because they were simply playing the same political game he was:

"Most of all, though, what Clinton liked about his Republican opponents was that he was better at politics than they were."

In another article from the UK, Clinton is quoted as having this to say about how history will remember him -- namely, with two footnotes:

"One is 'They impeached him', and the other is 'He stood up to them and beat them, and he beat them like a yard dog'."

That's a rather Arkansan way of putting it. Anyway, I have long wondered why so many Democrats are so tolerant of Republican hardball:

‘Good ol’ Jesse,’ is all Clinton will say of the poisonous, racist Jesse Helms, who has just called him ‘unfit’ to lead the armed forces and warned him to stay away from North Carolina for his own safety.

It is hard to imagine a German MP threatening the safety of the German chancellor, and even harder to imagine the German media and general public not reacting. But perhaps I now know what game these Democrats are playing -- the same one the Republicans are playing, just with a different strategy. Frankly, I think the game is not worth playing.

New Year's resolution - it's about renewables, not carbon

My New Year's resolution is going to be pretty easy for me: stop stressing carbon. It will be especially easy for me because I do not think the emphasis should be on carbon emissions anyway, and I was not interested in the recent conference in Copenhagen at all.

Basically, I believe we need to ramp up renewables, and doing so would reduce carbon emissions anyway, so if you want lower carbon emissions, you would get what you want. The opposite is unfortunately not true: reducing carbon emissions does not necessarily mean increasing renewables. We can lower carbon emissions by a number of other ways:

• Nuclear power
• Carbon capture and storage (at least, if the technology ever works)
• A whole slew of trading mechanisms involving carbon offsets, carbon sinks, and a lot of other things that will require a tremendous amount of monitoring, oversight, and penalties

Michael Hoexter does a pretty good job of pointing out how all of this carbon trading business is going to be a bureaucratic mess (I wonder how we can even measure carbon emissions today), so I won't go into all of that here. Suffice it to say that carbon trading came about because so many people believe that the market will come up with the best (by which "cheapest" is always meant) solution if left alone. The fact that the perfect market does not exist -- no market is perfectly transparent to begin with -- is rarely mentioned. If so many of us did not see the subprime crisis coming because we did not understand the bank products we had purchased, why do we think that markets work so well? And why do we think that the figures that the US and China will report on carbon emissions will be in any way reliable? (Are they reliable today?)

The issue of monitoring emissions has fortunately moved into the foreground recently, with the focus in English of course on whether China would allow international monitors to audit its published figures -- as though Americans would not game the system, when actually gaming the system is the first thing Americans would try to do (cf. Enron, the current banking crisis, Madoff, S&L from two decades ago, etc.).

I know a way to lower emissions without any kind of monitoring or penalties. And it even entails less governmental involvement than current US/UK policy (PDF), which, while claiming to be "market-based" actually involves approval procedures -- and your project can also be rejected.

The policy I am talking about would lower carbon emissions by switching to renewable energy. You would not need to monitor anything, and there would be no penalties because you would blow past all your targets anyway, instead of failing to reach them.

Granted, there is very little paperwork to be done, so bankers and lawyers will not make a lot of money in the process. We should therefore not expect to see a lot of these people interested in this policy, aside from the basic fact that the policy I am talking about creates investment security (PDF from Deutsche Bank), unlike fluctuating prices on some exchange.

The policy I am talking about is feed-in tariffs.

Twenty years from now, the next generation of political leaders would not have much to talk about when they meet, so they just might forgo another Copenhagen/Kyoto. After all, there would be no need to talk about failure to comply; the focus would instead be on preventing the market from overheating (= renewables growing too fast). And since there is no renewable fuel source to fill up our airplanes with, flying will become prohibitively expensive even if we continue to exempt kerosene from fuel taxation. So this next generation of leaders just might choose to do what they did this time around: convene via the web, such as in Google Wave.

Politicians might then not be able to fly around the world as much to meetings whose pointlessness overshadows their importance. But that would also lower emissions. (Keep in mind that claims about a further increases in carbon emissions are based on the notion that we will actually be able to increase our consumption of oil and coal. My money is on oil production dropping over the next 20 years, though I am not sure about future coal production rates. But the point is that emissions of do in fact drop, even without any carbon trading, when we run out of fossil energy.)

Which leaves us with nuclear. So if you want nuclear power in the future, remember that renewables are intermittent, and we will therefore increasingly need power plants that can be switched on and off quickly, which nuclear plants cannot. And if you still want nuclear, please send me your address so we can put some of these "dry casks" in your driveway.

And if you'll handle the nuclear waste, in return I'll be happy to have solar panels on my roof and windmills on a nearby hill in plain sight, thank you very much.