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NNadir

(33,368 posts)
1. Wow. No wonder the German solar industry is such an abysmal failure.
Thu Jun 28, 2012, 11:07 PM
Jun 2012

I mean, after more than a decade of mindless cheering by the wishful thinkers who are trying to screw future generations with a faith based "solar will save us" meme in Germany - and of course elsewhere - the entire German solar industry was able to produce just 11.1 billion kwh of electricity, which in average continuous power terms, is the equivalent of a 1200 MWe coal plant, except unlike the solar "plant" the coal plant didn't require 100's of billions of Euros to build, and of course, the coal plant doesn't need redundant gas plants to back it up.

It's easy to see why Germany has the highest electricity prices in Europe, except for Denmark.

European electricity prices

I mean, what we have is the gasbags, um, I mean liars, I mean, um, the solar industry still representing their products in peak watts, when there isn't a single solar panel in the entire nation of Germany that produces that much power even at noon on a cloudless summer day. The capacity utilization is more like 10%, meaning that $2.24/"watt" this is the equivalent of having to pay $224 to light an ordinary light bulb for an hour a day when the sun is shining.

Thanks for a tip on why Q Cells went bankrupt in Germany. Der Speigel: Bankruptcies Have German Solar on the Ropes, Twilight of an Industry

An industry that produces nothing but wishful thinking is bound to fail, and predictably, in this case, it did.

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