Weather Guard Lightning Tech
Germany Hits Negative Prices As France Goes Subsidy-Free
This episode covers three major wind power milestones: Germany hitting 51 GW of wind output with negative electricity prices, France launching its first floating offshore wind farm without subsidies, and Australia’s Goyder South becoming South Australia’s largest wind farm at 412 MW.
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Welcome to Uptime News. Flash Industry News Lightning fast. Your host, Alan Hall, shares the renewable industry news you may have missed.
Allen Hall 2025: There is news today from three continents about wind power in Germany. Last Friday, the wind began to blow storm Benjamins swed across the northern regions. Wind turbines spun faster and faster. By mid-morning wind output hit 51 gigawatts. That’s right. 51 gigawatts the highest. Since early last year, wind and solar together met nearly all of Germany’s electricity needs, and then something happened that would have seemed impossible.
20 years ago, the price of electricity went negative. Minus seven euros and 15 cents per megawatt hour. Too much wind, too much power, not enough demand. Meanwhile, off the coast of Southern [00:01:00] France, dignitaries gathered for a celebration. The Provenance Grand Large floating offshore wind farm. 25 megawatts.
Three Siemens Gamesa turbines mounted on floating platforms. France’s first floating offshore wind project. a real milestone, but here is what caught everyone’s attention. No government subsidies. EDF, Enbridge and CPP investments. Finance the entire project themselves. Self-finance, offshore wind in France.
Halfway around the world in South Australia, Neoen inaugurated Goyder South. 412 megawatts, 75 turbines, the largest wind farm in the state, the largest in Neoen portfolio. It will generate 1.5 TERAWATT hours annually. That’s a 20% increase in South Australia’s total wind generation.[00:02:00]
The state is racing towards 100% net renewables by 2027. Goyder South created 400 construction jobs, 12 permanent positions, over 100 million Australian dollars in local economic impact. Three different stories, three different continents, Europe, Asia Pacific, all celebrating wind power. But there is something else connecting these projects.
Something the general public does not see something only industry professionals understand. 20 years ago, wind energy was expensive, subsidized, and uncertain . Critics called it a fantasy that would never compete with coal or natural gas. Today, Germany has so much wind power that prices go negative.
France builds offshore wind farms without government money. Australia bets its entire energy future on renewables, and here is the number that tells the real [00:03:00] story. In 2005, global wind power capacity was 59 gigawatts. Today it exceeds 1000 gigawatts the cost per megawatt hour. It has dropped about 85%.
Wind power went from the most expensive electricity source to one of the cheapest in about two decades faster than pretty much anyone had predicted, cheaper than anyone had really forecasted. the critics said it could not be done, and the skeptics said it would never compete. The doubters said it was decades away, and they were pretty much all wrong.
Today France celebrates its first commercial scale floating offshore wind farm. And Germany’s grid operator manages negative prices as routine Australia plans to run an entire state on renewable energy. Within about two years, the impossible became inevitable, and you, the wind energy professionals listening to this, you [00:04:00] made it happen.
Engineers, technicians, project managers, turbine designers, grid operators. Every one of you helped prove the skeptics wrong. 20 years ago, you were building a dream. Today you are powering the world.
https://weatherguardwind.com/germany-negative-price-france/
American workers who are facing agonizing and preventable deaths predominantly vote for the party that is condemning them to that horrible fate.
That’s just one of the many disgusting facets of today’s life in the U.S.
Oh my goodness! Is “Liz Churchill” right?
We hear all the time that Dr. Anthony Fauci, who served Americans’ health needs under seven presidents, created COVID-19 in a Chinese lab and deliberately inflicted it on U.S. citizens, killing millions. The anti-science right is cranking up the animus against the man, and now, tens of millions of Americans are desperate to have him sentenced to prison.
A few facts are presented below. What they seem to show is that whoever authored the meme here simply made up lies that would serve to undermine our scientific method and make all this crap fodder for the Fox News / MAGA crowd.
Unvaccinated individuals face a significantly higher risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 compared to vaccinated individuals. Historical and public health data consistently show that vaccines offer robust protection against the most severe outcomes of the virus. [1, 2, 3]
- Early Variant Spikes: During earlier waves like the Delta variant, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that unvaccinated individuals were up to 29 times more likely to be hospitalized. [1]
- Severe Complications: Hospitalized unvaccinated patients are more likely to experience moderate-to-severe disease, spend more days in the ICU, and have a higher likelihood of complications. [1]
- Financial Burden: A study by the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker noted that unvaccinated patients historically accounted for the vast majority of preventable COVID-19 health system costs due to lengthy, intensive hospital stays. [1]
- Elevated Death Rates: Data compiled by platforms like Our World in Data demonstrate a clear gap in mortality, with unvaccinated individuals dying at significantly higher rates per capita. [1]
Meet Reid Rasner (photo at left). He’s a MAGA Republican running for congress in Wyoming–that’s a good fit.
He faces three challenges, however:
1) He’s openly gay, a terrible fit for Wyoming,
2) His politics appeals only to the true idiot. While it’s true that voters there are not well-educated, they’re aware and alert. They’ve seen trickle-down economics fail consistently since the days of Roland Reagan, and they’ll be very hard to convince that democratic socialism as it’s implemented around the world makes the nation’s citizens poor, and
3) I hate to judge a book by its cover, but he looks like a dullard.
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