Articles by

Karl-friedrich Lenz

Time for Fossil Fuel Feed-in Tariffs

By

Karl-friedrich Lenz

If you want to help coal miners and coal companies, you need to introduce a feed-in tariff for coal. Just like a feed-in tariff helped phase in renewable energy (mostly paid for by Germany back when solar was expensive), now a feed-in tariff is needed to phase out coal in a orderly and responsible way.

Illegal Failure of German Renewable Policy

By

Karl-friedrich Lenz

The auction model is supposed to be more market-oriented. It is not. In an auction model, the amount of new installations is decided by the government, not the market. If you have 300 MW of solar auctions, the market can’t decide to do 3 GW instead.

Trump Energy EO no Big Surprise

By

Karl-friedrich Lenz

To help the coal industry you need regulation that actively steps in and guarantees feed-in tariffs for coal.

German Policy Failure

By

Karl-friedrich Lenz

As Hans-Josef Fell points out in this comment, renewable sources provided 186 TWh in 2016. That’s not bad, but only 3 TWh over the result of 2015. That’s stagnation. And it shows that the move to an auction model from 2014 on is a policy failure.

Energy New Deal

By

Karl-friedrich Lenz

So even if you think global warming was a hoax the Chinese invented for April fool’s day in 2016, you should still support a fast transition to renewable. This transition makes sense as a nationalist policy. It also creates quite a lot of jobs that can’t be outsourced to some other country, since they are based on installing renewable energy infrastructure.

Horrible Harmful EU Commission Proposal

By

Karl-friedrich Lenz

I also note that the proposal still includes “feed-in tariffs” in the definition of “support schemes”, which remains completely unchanged.

Trump Contribution to Global Warming Policy

By

Karl-friedrich Lenz

Trump has been elected president. Most people expect this to be bad news for climate policy. But Trump has already contributed strongly to the effort.

China Electric Car Quota Legislation

By

Karl-friedrich Lenz

China wants to introduce a modest quota of 8 percent electrical vehicles from 2018. German car makers are not happy about those plans, since they have been slow to develop hybrids and electric vehicles.

Proposals to Bring Down FIT Surcharge

By

Karl-friedrich Lenz

Two the German States want to stretch the period for paying back the funds invested in renewable over a longer time frame.

No New Gasoline Cars in EU after 2030

By

Karl-friedrich Lenz

SPIEGEL reports that the German Bundesrat has called for phasing out gasoline cars after 2030 all over the EU (report in English by Reuters here).

Mine Gas Feed-in Tariff as Precedent for Hydrogen FiT

By

Karl-friedrich Lenz

Anyway, if there is a feed-in tariff for mine gas, there is really no reason not to have one for power to gas hydrogen as well.

Feed-in Tariff for Hydrogen?

By

Karl-friedrich Lenz

So I was wondering if there was any way to use a feed-in tariff system to boost the power to gas sector, just as a feed-in tariff system has successfully brought solar to scale up quickly.