Germany needs a master plan to bring together central and local government policy which gives investors and project firms certainty if the $420bn is to be found to finance a decisive shift to green power.

AS MANY know, Germany has been captured by their Greenies. They arrange armadas of volunteers ready to lie down in front of trains guarded by hundreds of police and militias transporting spent nuclear fuel, and, peace-loving though the Greenies are, they’re quite willing to indulge in punch-ups to get their message across.

But it’s turning out to be a tad expensive. The country needs a master plan to bring together central and local government policy which — and this is the important bit — gives investors and project firms certainty if the $420bn (about R3,5-trillion) is to be found to finance a decisive shift to green power.

But it also transpires that Germany’s energy U-turn, the move to switch off its nuclear plants and increase its wind and solar power generation, may be the subject of another U-turn. It is estimated that the cost of dismantling all of Germans nuclear plants by 2022 will be €44bn (R450bn).

So, guess what? Germany’s politicians are now starting to tell their electorate that it may be necessary to readjust targets in the plan to exit nuclear energy-generation by 2022 if jobs are threatened.

The accompanying information is startling.

If Germany closes down its nine nuclear power stations by 2022 it will need to have built wind farms that will cover an area six times the size of New York and build or upgrade 8200km of power lines.

Readers will know of my own resolute opposition to wind farms. But even I was startled by something I read in the UK Independent (July 23). Wind farm protagonists have long peddled the story that there will be no discernible effect on a house a few hundred metres from a moving and noisy structure the height of the London Eye (135m), but the Valuation Office has blown that out of the water. It says the market value of council houses close to these contraptions has plummeted.

Some bone-headed individuals actually advance the theory that, since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it is possible to see the beauty of these turbines when you drive past them on a motorway or see them across a valley.

But surveys of those who say they favour their use are of those who have never seen a wind turbine. So long as it’s someone else’s problem, that’s just fine by them.

And, just to add to the growing accumulation of evidence that says old-style windmills just don’t cut it, the information out of Colorado in the US is that the use of unreliable wind power has the effect of increasing, not decreasing, nasty emissions from fossil-fired power stations. That’s because coal-fired boilers are designed to operate as a base load resource — in other words, to operate all the time at a consistent output level. Coal units are not designed for cycling, throttling back as it were. The result of adding wind power to the mix is that emissions are substantially increased.

And the Colorado examination indicates that the problem will worsen over time unless mitigation measures are taken. These gentlemen know what they are talking about: one of the utilities involved, PSCO, is the largest provider of wind power in the US, so it is fully aware of the problems at first hand.

I was reading a sentence about Germany and Angela Merkel’s problem and attitude when the following arrested me: "… Merkel promised to phase out reactors in favour of renewables such as solar and wind following the meltdown in Japan."

In fact, the Fukushima-Daiichi plants were operating perfectly after the earthquake, shutting down sequentially exactly as designed. It was the tsunami that broke the necessary connections and flooded parts of the stations.

The result was a meltdown of three generating plants, and Japan and everyone was probably saved to some extent by the prevailing winds that took the radiation out to sea.

But nuclear power remains easily the most reputable and safest way to go — it’s just that uranium needs to be jettisoned in favour of thorium which, had it been the fuel in use at Fukushima-Daiichi, would have prevented a meltdown whatever was thrown at it.

Thorium cannot go into meltdown. And thorium was the fuel originally selected in Germany back in the 1960s for thermal power generation. It was superseded by uranium because that makes bombs, which thorium doesn’t.

E-mail: david@gleason.co.za Twitter: @TheTorqueColumn