[LINK] "Thank Germany for Falling Prices of Solar Panels and Wind Turbines"

[rfmcdonald]

At Bloomberg Businessweek, Harold L. Sirkin favourably praises Germany's heavy investments in renewable energy as the sort of policy that will make it cost-effective and help save us all.

The New York Times reported that nearly 30 percent of Germany’s electric power comes from renewable energy sources, and the percentage is growing. This is not without a downside: Traditional electric utilities are struggling.

Additional large industrial countries also have been stepping away from high-polluting fossil fuels for power generation. Brazil, according to the International Energy Agency, gets more than 80 percent of its electric power from renewables, mostly sugarcane ethanol. And more than 60 percent of Canada’s electricity comes from hydropower. But these are special cases, owing to Canada’s abundant white-water resources and Brazil’s highly advanced sugarcane industry.

Germany is a special case as well, for different reasons. While it’s a global leader in hydro technology and the construction of hydroelectric power plants, Germany gets little of its own electric power from this source. It is nowhere to be found among the world’s sugarcane producers. And with Russia supplying a reported 38 percent of its natural gas imports, 35 percent of its imported oil, and a quarter of its imported coal, Germany made a wise decision to move in new directions—generating electricity from wind and sun, renewable energy sources that the U.S. has been much slower to adopt.

The situation in the United States is much different. Our largest supplier of energy imports is Canada. Saudi Arabia is No. 2, and Mexico is No. 3.

The U.S. has hardly been sitting still. Thanks to advances in hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) technologies, the country has become the world’s top producer of natural gas, a clean and abundant fossil fuel. Germany, on the other hand, is threatening to ban fracking.