Germany’s energy poverty is about to get worse, as poor people are threatened with being put out in the cold by the country’s green energies.
Electricity prices “higher than they have ever been”
German news weekly Stern here reports that “electricity prices will rise further at the start of the year” and that “there is no relief in sight with electricity prices”.
According to the Verivox-consumer price index, the price of electricity for a “representative household” with three persons and an annual consumption of 4000 kilowatt-hours was 28.20 euro-cents per kilowatt-hour in 2017, some 0.77 cents more than a year earlier, Stern reports. “At the end of the current year power was never so expensive.”
On January 1, 2018, the mean price will rise to 28.44 cents a kilowatt-hour.
German electricity prices are among the world’s highest, and are in large part directly due to the country’s shoddily executed Energiewende (transition to renewable energies) and EEG feed-in act, which mandates that highly unstable, inefficient and expensive wind and solar energy be forced-fed into the power grid in place of fossil-fuel generated electricity.
The rising prices of German electricity are another blow to lower income families and the poor. Meanwhile rich land and property owners who have the luxury of leasing the space for installing wind and solar systems are making money by the fistful. Social critics have called the scheme “the biggest transfer of wealth from bottom to top ever.
328,000 saw their power cut off in 2016
Citing the German Grid Agency, German aid organization Caritas here reports of 328,000 “carried out power disconnections” and over 6 million threatened power service cut-offs in 2016.
In cooperation with the ZEW (Centre for European Economics), Caritas determined in a survey that it is poor households who are the hardest hit.
via NoTricksZone
December 27, 2017 at 11:20AM
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