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Germany
Where Have All the Green Jobs Gone...?
24 October 2012
(EIRNS)—While Greenies like Fritz Kuhn, the winner of the second round of the Stuttgart mayoral race on Oct. 21, continue to sing their song of the hundreds of thousands of jobs they would create in "green industry," that very "industry" is rapidly on its way down, falling faster than autumn leaves, already. For example, continuously heavy losses in the solar branch has forced Siemens to walk out of the technology and to sell (if it can) its solar-thermic and photovoltaic divisions, focussing on wind and geo-thermal technologies, instead. The same pattern goes for Bosch and Schott, which adds up to three of the largest companies in that branch in Germany, pulling out of solar cell technology. This continues the collapse of solar-tech in Germany: Centrotherm, SMA Solar, Solar Millennium are suffering from losses, too, and Q-Cells, the former world market leader for solar cells, has been taken over by the Korean Hanwa Group, after filing for insolvency. So far, the "sustainability" of the solar alternative, another Green pet project, is going extinct in manner of the notorious dodo bird. Another Green pet project is also collapsing: The Danish firm Dong Energy is fed up with endless and fruitless talks with the German bureaucracy, and will walk out of the ambitious wind park project Borkum Riffgrund 2, off the North Sea coast. The main problem here is that the wind park makes no sense if it is not connected to a transmission grid, and when that connection will be built remains entirely uncertain. "Grid provider Tennet has assured us of a connection but does not want to set a reliable date, when the connection to the German power grid can be completed," Christoph Mertens, Germany manager of Dong Energy, told the press yesterday. Dong Energy also suspended orders for 97 windmills with 300 megawatts of combined capacity, from Siemens. Olaf Lies, economic policy spokesman of the SPD group in the Lower Saxony Landtag (state parliament), had a psychological meltdown yesterday about the Dong Energy announcement, ranting that "several months ago, there was still talk of 20,000 new jobs that would be created by the Energiewende in this branch. Reality looks alarmingly different: pylon producer CSC in Cuxhaven will lay off workers, so will rotor producer Bard Offshore in Emden, and steel component producer Nordseewerke in Emden has filed insolvency." There goes the green jobs miracle, gone with the wind, and those who voted Kuhn in, in Stuttgart, voted for a loser and windbag hoaxster. Rainer APEL |