Germany to cut subsidies for solar power

Have they consulted with Mr. Gore?

$0.24/KWH??? GTFO What are the germans paying for electricity? That's sick.

And then there was SOLYNDRA !!!!?????

Now I've seen it all, socialized electricity. Why not give subsidies for using solar? Because too many people may use it and it would cost the government too much money. At least the German Government decided to give the subsidys to people and not give it to Solindra.

why don't they build solar panels around the wind turbines? get as much use out of the land as possible...

Only idiots think solar panels can produce power dusk to dawn
In Germany Solar panel only produce power for 4.5 hours a day.
Because of bad weather Germany produced no solar power the entire month of December

Solar hot water is cheaper than photovoltaics. Israel mandates them on houses built. I don't think we need laws to mandate these things but if new housing integrates these simple devices combined with better insulation of homes and windows, we can cut our energy usage by nearly half.

In general this has all been an attempt to control the lives of people to an even further degree. What better topic than climate change or oil fears because it touches nearly every aspect of our lives. What kind of car you own, the kind of bulb you screw in. Europe despite a tendency to typically be colder than America on average has higher heat related fatalities. Temperatures that kill hundreds in Europe are quite common in say...Dallas. European cities are virtually devoid of air conditioning in large part because the energy to run them is so expensive. And why is that? Pressured by vocal environmentalists, European governments have levied energy tax after energy tax, with the latest excuse being global warming. Their way to stop global warming, of course, is to restrict the use of energy, which can only be accomplished by raising the price to a level at which people begin to self-ration their consumption. This is how trade wars get started, this is how revolts, revolutions and the gruesome execution of aristocracies took place. Ive seen information regarding Europe's energy policy and I'm surprised those citizens haven't revolted. Thanks to immense subsidies and heavy taxation; Greece is broke, Italy is broke, Spain and Portugal are nearly broke. It's too bad that the Kyoto Protocol or various legislation will do nothing measurable about the Earth's average temperature for the foreseeable future. But it will kill thousands and thousands more in France, Germany and England, where energy taxes are enormous, creating purposeful blackouts.

Solar and wind is not the answer. It's a good move in the right direction, but not the answer. It may not seem like much now, but one day land availibility will be brutal, because of the vast amounts of land it takes to build these huge Sun/wind farms. Add to that, rising metal prices for affordable batteries for storage. Also when it dawns on home owners how much they'll be paying to reroof a house with solar panels on it, and that all profits just went out the window; they will stop installing them.

Good sign for solar. cheaper costs = lower subsidies + higher volumes. finally

every solar panel,windmill,heat pump etc. the better the sooner oil takes a backseat to greenenergy the better!

18 to 23 cents a kwh? I looked at my bill last month, here in tennessee I am paying 8.5 cents a KWH... I had better be quite about this cause Obama want my electric bill to go up...
But i am working on solar panels.. I have about 1000 watts and a 50 wind power generator
but it cost me far more for those than the current electric bill

In Germany solar panels only produce power for 4 hours day on average.

that #$%$ Energizer bunny!

and they are shutting down there nucs as well

According to Wikipedia, 3% of German electricity was supplied by solar power in 2011. No where near 20% as this article would lead you to believe.

If it's such a success story why is Germany building coal plants? The German Parliament has made a precedent setting move, not only have they set a plan to phase out all nuclear by 2022, but the Parliament has committed to renewable energy like wind and solar as the replacement. The goal to help Germany with its objective to reduce carbon pollution 40% by 2020. The truth is Germany alone is already nearing completion of 13 Gigawatts of fossil fuel plants, mainly coal-fired, and is planning to build an additional 10 Gigawatts of such plants to meet it's energy demands in order for them to keep operating in an industrial economy. Every major renewable energy source has drawn criticism from leading environmental groups: hydro for river habitat destruction, wind for avian mortality, solar for desert overdevelopment, biomass for air emissions and soil depletion, and geothermal for depletion and toxic discharges. Why is Greenpeace helping Germany with deception that they'll shift away from coal fueled power plants and claiming that this will help Germany to achieve a 40% reduction in carbon pollution”by 2020 when it is obvious that there will be a large increase in carbon emissions as a result of the closing of nuclear plants and the opening of an equivalent number of coal and gas plants? Could it be because Germany is Greenpeace’s biggest source of funding and that Greenpeace wishes the public to think this is a great victory for the environment. Highly subsidized solar is eclipsed, as demonstrated by the recent bankruptcy of Evergreen Solar in Massachusetts or Solyndra even after our government support. Germany is reducing the subsidies because they're going broke and their attempt to pass new taxes such as the new airline emissions fee to prop up Greece and keep them afloat. Suntech, the world's largest producer of solar panels has seen its shares plunge 88 percent. In the beginning, Germans paid a "feed-in tariff" of 65 cents per kilowatt-hour for power from the roof; the total comparable cost for power from a new gas plant in the United States is about 6 cents. A grand total of 1.9 percent of Germany's power comes from solar. Spain's massive solar subsidy program soon got out of hand too, sending the country further and further into hock, and Spain finally cut it back, which further tanked the solar industry, which never should have expanded so much given a nearly 18 percent unemployment rate. The contagion spread to the United Kingdom in the form of wind mills but political rebellion in the UK spread and in response, Prime Minister David Cameron, who promised the "greenest government ever" recently cut the solar feed-in tariff in Britain by 50 percent. The bottom line is that wind and solar power are simply uncompetitive. Because of the inconstancy of the wind and the rotation of Earth, backup capacity (gas or coal) of more than the average power production from "renewables" must be in place to preserve electrical stability. This capacity increasingly is in the form of natural-gas generation. The discovery of hundreds of years of natural gas in worldwide shale deposits guarantees that solar and wind will not produce much of the world's power for the foreseeable future.

Doesn't matter is Obama is listening or not. He thinks he is smarter than anyone else.

Govt shouldn't subsidize anything beyond R&D. All the rest should depend on what the consumer will bear. In any country.

The Government shouldn't have to subsidize something that will work on it's own. A good idea and product will take care of itself!