The European wind sector wants higher energy prices. Consumers will pay
Being “Green” is not free. Electricity prices in the European Union must rise for the region's wind energy sector to recover, according to the head of electricity industry group Eurelectric. Bloomberg dedicated an article to the problem.
Wind companies like Siemens Energy AG and Orsted AS are battling problems including inflation, higher interest rates and supply chain bottlenecks, as well as, evidently, design and forecasting failures, and all of this is putting future projects.
“If the entire manufacturing sector is losing money, or claims to be losing money, to me that indicates that the situation is not sustainable,” Eurelectric President Leonhard Birnbaum said in an interview. “It simply means that renewable projects will become more expensive.”
The EU has sought to support the wind sector, one of its leading industries, in order to reach its climate goals and stave off competition from China and the United States for clean energy production. The challenge was how to do this without increasing costs for consumers and now this mission is becoming impossible.
In the UK, the government increased the support price for new offshore wind farms by 66% in a bid to boost investment in the crisis-hit sector. The EU will find itself facing similar choices, and the sacrificial victim will always be the same: the consumer, who will have to bear these extra costs through laws, orders and tariffs, whether he wants to or not. It's not up to him to decide anyway.
The alternative that Europe now faces, given the hasty decisions taken by politicians and companies, is that of choosing between charging higher electricity tariffs now, immediately, or intervening with subsequent bailouts of the companies that have invested in wind power and are now recording continuous losses, according to the models showcased by German Siemens and Danish Orsted , which even had to withdraw from markets such as North America and Norway.
Obviously no one asked European consumers what they think, whether they believe it is right to sacrifice financial resources for glaring programming errors and to pursue a decarbonisation that has no impact on a global level. Everything goes on the automatic pilot of bureaucracy that flies over the heads of citizens, reduced to subjects and spectators.
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The article The European wind sector wants higher energy prices. Consumers will pay comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/bisogna-sovvenzionare-di-piu-lenergia-eolica-pagheranno-i-consumatori/ on Sun, 19 Nov 2023 15:10:46 +0000.