Germans continue to pay a heavy price for allowing their government to jump on board the “renewable energy” bandwagon — just as it was about to crash into the brick wall of energy reality. The online version of Der Spiegel, Germany’s largest newsweekly magazine, reported on March 26 that four of the nation’s top 12 “Capital Destroyers” of 2014 are solar tech companies. The Germany-based Pierre Gosselin of NoTrickZone.com provides an analysis in English of the Spiegel article, which is entitled, “Market Losers: These German Companies Destroyed the Most Capital.”
The number-one German capital destroyer of 2014, Spiegel writes, was Solarworld. “The company lost almost 82 percent of its value. Since 2010 the share price has gone in the cellar, falling 99.5 percent,” Spiegel reports.
“Not only Solarworld made it on the list of the Top German Destroyers Of Capital, but so did 3 other solar technology companies,” notes Gosselin. “Brandenburg-based Aleo Solar took 6th place, losing 57 percent of its value in 2014.”
Gosselin, an engineer and a climate realist blogger, continues:
The solar technology bloodbath was extended by 1999-founded Phoenix Solar, which lost 96% of its value last year, Spiegel writes. The company took 9th place.
Solar technology company SMA took 12th place on the list of the top German capital destroyers. No industry comes close to destroying the amount of capital that the solar industry wiped out last year. The big losers are from the solar industry, hands down.
The capital destruction that is Germany’s highly ballyhooed “Energiewende” (transition to renewable energy) does not end in the solar sector, but extends to the conventional power companies, who are reeling from the impacts of the subsidized renewable energies. Energy giants RWE and E.on come in at 35th and 43rd place respectively.
One senses that Germany’s entire energy industry is breaking up and falling to pieces. It is truly mind-boggling how anyone can say solar energies are the future — unless you’re an insolvency administrator, that is.
And Germany’s solar tech news is not likely to get any sunnier any time soon. Bloomberg Business reported on March 26 that “solar bellwether” SMA’s business will continue to shrink. “SMA Solar Technology AG, whose domination of a niche in the business used to make it a bellwether of health in the photovoltaic industry, said it expects sales to shrink for a fifth straight year,” said the Bloomberg report.
“The maker of inverters that convert power from solar panels for use on electricity grids expects revenue of as much as 770 million euros ($846 million) this year,” Bloomberg noted. That’s down from a peak of 1.9 billion euros in 2010, reportedly due to SMA’s failure to gain enough new sales in China as its home market in Germany shrinks.
As The New American has reported previously, the German government was given plenty of warning that its disastrous “green” energy policies would wreak havoc on its economy — without producing any environmental benefit, or having any impact whatsoever on global temperatures. We noted, for example, Danish professor and best-selling environmental author Bjørn Lomborg, who stated in 2012 that Germany’s huge solar subsidies (over $110 billion) would come back to haunt them.
In 2013, Raine Baake, one of the key architects of Germany’s energy debacle, came to the United States to help President Obama promote more of the same here. Bloomberg News helped the effort with the publication of Baake’s essay “U.S. Energy Policy Should Take a Lesson From Germany’s Energiewende,” co-authored with Jennifer Morgan, director of the Climate and Energy Program at the World Resources Institute (WRI).
To the extent that Americans allow our politicians to continue imposing similarly destructive energy policies on the United States, we can expect to experience similarly devastating results.
Related articles and videos:
German Firms Flee to U.S. to Avoid Staggering “Green” Energy Costs
Germany Cuts Subsidies to Floundering Solar Industry
Welcome to the Renewable Energy Future: A Lesson From Germany
The Real Green in Fedgov’s “Green Energy” (Solyndra & Goldman Sachs)
UN Demands $76 Trillion for “Green Technology”
Celebrity Global-warming Hypocrisy (Video)
Greenpeace “Heretic” Dr. Patrick Moore: CO2 Good; Greenpeace “Anti-human” (Video)
