let me play inline advocatus diaboli [reordered]

>>>>>Is an EPA mandate at the national level to generate 28% of our electrical power from solar panels and wind turbines (with roughly two-thirds of that coming from wind) any less wrong? :)
>>>
>Why is that so bad?
>Would you rather that they invaded a country or two?
>Of course I'm being facetious, but holy cow, what can be so bad about requiring people to move toward renewable energy? Is that really so bad?
>
>Government intervention is often necessary to make that happen.
>Unlike the US, Germany imports almost all its oil.

Embolded is true.
But totally irrelevant for the electricity part of energy:
https://www.destatis.de/DE/ZahlenFakten/Wirtschaftsbereiche/Energie/Erzeugung/Tabellen/Bruttostromerzeugung.html
http://www.strom-magazin.de/info/stromerzeugung-in-deutschland/
(sorry for posting links in german, but the gist is: 40+% by the 2 variations of coal, ~15% atomic, ~10%natural gas, all renewables ~25%)

The import argument DOES apply to natural gas (90% imported, 30+% from russia - seen more critical with economic sanctions rising again), but natural gas is used in decentralized heating a lot, so dependency to russia is lowered to a much smaller degree if less natural gas is turned into electricity.
Coal has different percentages in the variants, mostly due to labour prices and to a similar degree ease of mining, so dependancy leverage is smaller.

>My wife's cousin in Germany has built hydro-electric turbines using mountain streams that produce enough electricity to power several villages. He did it because the government, in order to cut dependence on oil, gave assurances that the price of electricity would never go below a certain level.
>He still has risks- mechanical failures, natural disasters, etc. but those government assurances took away the price risk and made the project feasible.

>The villages have reliable sources of power, prices are lower and the dependence on oil has gone down.

If the last sentence had been written by someone living here for a stretch of years, the last sentence would evoke strong hints of rhetoric/demagogic ;-)
Hydroelectricity itself is quite reliable due to mostly distributed, mechanical points of failure, barring drought (seldom in water-rich germany) and dam failure. But when offered in discussion on ALL renewable energy, this is misleading, as total reliability is lower recently, largely due to rising % of renewables, mostly due to sun and wind variations in time.

>Government intervention is often necessary to make that happen.
....
>In order to enforce those assurances, the government controls electricity prices.
>Socialism!!!!
>It's working.

The camels back is not broken at this point and IMO some gov stimuli moved things in a positive direction. but it certainly is not without fault.

The decision to not only forbid new nuclear power plants but also to reduce the running time allowed for existing plants IMO was only politically motivated to be able to form coalitions with the greens, done at Fukushima time point. IMO economic disaster and also one of the reasons planned CO2 reductions are in danger. NOT going into discussion about need for CO2 reduction - just accepting the current political reality as basis for the argument.

There is a price hike of >20% almost totally due to subsidy of photovoltaics. In retrospect, those price guarantees should have been made with a better reduction scheme, but that was hard to calculate. But the argued building of a strong german photovoltaic industry happened only during subvention time, nowadays the majority comes from china - with special dues added as those modules are deemed to show a unfairly low price. honi soit qui mal y pense

Even worse: gov already levvies those price hikes even to some photovoltaic energy, which is only self-consumed and NOT sold at those guaranteed prices. IMO an early attempt to create tax-like dues to energy harvested and consumed without taxable intermediaries. Later on exemptions currently in place can easily be cancelled or reduced... Socialism indeed, and in this specific case I am extremly sorry it is working - I see similarities to frog boiling...