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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MJB" data-source="post: 3299492" data-attributes="member: 88928">Neat deflection. Denmark has high taxes generally because the political will was there to provide for a civilised society that looks after its elderly, its children's education, its physical and mental health funding as the priorities, which is why energy costs to consumers is high. I concede that political change could reverse that.As for dumping energy on to other nations' grids, you'll have to provide citations from the countries involved, because there is no way that any recipient country can identify the origin of the electricity, be it wind, coal or nuclear. All countries on the shared European grids have inter-country financial agreements, and if there are exceptions in those agreements, you need to cite which agreements have those exceptions.The costs of any wind-power subsidies Germany has paid for are but a tiny fraction of the costs of building new conventional or nuclear power stations and the decommissioning costs of the latter, which includes nuclear waste storage for millennia.The costs of designing and installing a Europe-wide dc grid will undoubtedly be high, but the power losses that grid will experience is around one twentieth of ac grid losses. Load transfer across a dc grid (to supply power, for example from a windy area to a windless area) and load balancing are much simpler than for an ac grid, but because dc power can be stored, the need for large-scale transfers can be reduced. What doesn't exist at present is the infrastructure between a dc grid and household - design and production of mass-produced voltage step-down units is some way off.Many household electrical items already are dc-powered, but when ac powere has to be converted to dc power, losses are considerable, and so the supplied power is more expensive than that from a dc grid. The potential for consumer savings is huge.MJB</blockquote>

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